Law And Order: Organized Crime gets its fifth showrunner in just 3 years on the air

We’ve remarked, more than once, on the oddities and drama surrounding Christopher Meloni’s Law And Order spin-off Organized Crime. For a franchise that usually runs like “DUN-DUN”-sounding clockwork, the side story series has had an incredible amount of turnover at its highest reaches in its three seasons of television—to the point that the incoming showrunner for its fourth season, John Shiban, will be the fifth such executive producer/writer to take on the apparently doomed job.

In case it’s not clear, that’s a lot of showrunners: Even shows that make a point of swapping out their top execs every season don’t do it in the middle of a season—but Organized Crime’s series of departures, replacements, and placeholder leaders have made that kind of shift necessary more than once. (It’s actually even a fair bit worse than “five showrunners in three years” might suggest, since the official recounting—original showrunner Ilene Chaiken begat Hannah Montana co-creator Barry O’Brien, who begat Bryan Goluboff, who begat Sean Jablonski, who begat David Graziano—doesn’t count either Craig Gore or Matt Olmstead, who were both attached, or allegedly attached, to the series while it was still in development.) (Note: Shows where everything is going great do not typically have to include the word “allegedly” in their list of producer credits.)

Anyway, everything is just fine now, as Shiban takes the reigns of the series, which we are sure he will have no problem keeping hold of. We don’t even mean that sarcastically, really: Shiban is a TV vet, having penned and produced shows like The X-Files, Breaking Bad, Supernatural, Hell On Wheels, and, most recently, Ozark, so it’s not like he doesn’t know from smart, satisfying genre TV. Interestingly—and in contrast to most of the guys who’ve been swapped in and out of this job over the last three years—he’s also not a product of the Dick Wolf TV machine, having come up outside the wide arms of the Law & Order franchise.

So far, Organized Crime is the only one of Wolf’s nine current TV shows that haven’t already started cranking out scripts in the aftermath of the writers’ strike; now that Shiban has been installed, the show will presumably join the pack, with an eye on being part of NBC’s midseason schedule.

[via The Hollywood Reporter]