Surprise! The three-hour Law & Order Thursday lineup will be back on NBC‘s fall schedule. Law & Order: Organized Crime, which moved from NBC to Peacock ahead of its fifth season a year ago, will return to the broadcast network. Its fifth season, which recently wrapped its run on the NBCUniversal streamer, will get a second window on NBC, airing in its old Thursday 10 PM slot behind Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU. The L&W trio will debut their new seasons Sept. 25.
The intention with Organized Crime‘s move to Peacock was to make the drama starring Christopher Meloni even more serialized and edgy. While it is serialized, I hear Season 5 was not as dark as anticipated, making it suitable for a 10 PM run on broadcast where the expectation is that it would reach a largely new audience.
Peacock has not made a renewal call on Organized Crime yet. While the run on NBC is a windowing move, the show’s performance will likely inform NBCUniversal’s decision whether to pick up Season 6 of the drama for Peacock — or NBC.
With Organized Crime sliding back into its old time period, it is displacing sophomore drama The Hunting Party, which was supposed to move into the hour in the fall. The series, starring Melissa Roxburgh, will now be held for midseason, with NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics, the Super Bowl and NBA’s all-star game used to promote its launch.
The delay would give The Hunting Party more time as it is relocating from Vancouver to New York for Season 2, with the hope to tap into the theater community for talent the way the Law & Order series have done. Meanwhile, the NBC’s other sophomore drama, Brilliant Minds, which will debut its second season Sept. 22 in its old post-Voice Monday 10 PM slot, started filming today in Toronto.
As NBC is preparing to add NBA to its primetime schedule on Oct. 21, the network has filled the vacant half-hour slots behind sophomore comedies St. Denis Medical on Monday and Happy’s Place on Friday in the two hourlong comedy blocks that are launching in November. The network didn’t look far as it will use back-to-back episodes of St. Denis Medical and Happy’s Place to fill each block at the start.
(Excerpt) Read more in: Deadline