The final new case of Regulation & Order aired just below six months in the past, with the Season 22 finale doubling as longtime star Sam Waterston’s four-hundredth episode. On the time, the WGA writers strike had begun, however the SAG-AFTRA actors weren’t placing but, and there was motive to hope that the long-running NBC drama could possibly be again in September as typical for the franchise. Almost six months later, the strikes are lastly each over. With manufacturing on L&O Season 23 anticipated to start earlier than the tip of November, I flashed again to some feedback from actor Mehcad Brooks from final season, they usually make me extra hopeful than ever for what comes subsequent.
First issues first! The actors strike ended on November 9 when SAG-AFTRA struck a cope with the AMPTP, adopted by studies that Regulation & Order (together with SVU, Organized Crime, and the opposite reveals within the Wolf Leisure franchise) was aiming to salvage a 13-episode TV season with manufacturing for the 2023-2024 lineup starting after Thanksgiving. It is unlikely that followers will see characters like Mehcad Brooks’ Jalen Shaw, Sam Waterston’s Jack McCoy, or any of the opposite L&O sequence regulars any prior to February 2024, however that is positively progress that left me interested by how Season 23 might decide up on Season 22, and that took me again to an interview from almost a 12 months in the past.
I would spoken with Mehcad Brooks for a key episode of Season 22, earlier than the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes started. Shaw took heart stage in final season’s fall finale, as he handled what the actor described as his character’s “worst nightmare” of placing any individual behind bars after unknowingly taking a false confession. Fittingly referred to as “The System,” the episode additionally touched on how the system had failed an harmless Black man to the purpose that he had no good decisions, and there actually was no approach for a contented ending. Shaw had left a profession in legislation behind to try to change the system, and this episode compelled him to think about whether or not he had simply turn out to be a part of it.
It wasn’t a enjoyable hour of tv for Jalen Shaw in Season 22, however “The System” was a standout episode for me each as a showcase of Regulation & Order‘s latest sequence common and one which requested viewers to rethink their preconceptions not solely concerning the present and the characters, but in addition actual life. When it aired in 2022, I requested Mehcad Brooks how necessary he felt it was for a present as profitable and long-running as Regulation & Order to sort out the subject, and his feedback go away me hoping that Season 23 will revisit it. Brooks stated that he thinks it is “actually necessary,” and elaborated:
I believe it is brave. I believe it is courageous, however I additionally assume it is sensible, in that Regulation & Order is an establishment that is ready to attain out to a multiplicity of numerous People inside their very own houses and dwelling rooms and eating rooms, and maybe even spark conversations that might create a extra equitable future for all of us. So I believe that if we’re in a position to discuss a system and folks’s lived experiences that we could know nothing about, if we are able to settle for folks’s lived experiences as true, the place does the dialog begin to go? Perhaps the dialog begins to incorporate compassion, possibly the dialog begins to incorporate the understanding that I do know nothing about your expertise. Then how will we repair it? We all know there’s an issue, however how will we repair it?
Regulation & Order hasn’t amassed almost 500 episodes over 22 seasons and counting as a result of it fails to achieve an viewers; as Mehcad Brooks identified, the present doubtlessly sparking conversations might assist to unfold understanding. The precise case of a given episode would not must be ripped from real-life headlines to get folks speaking, and that might result in optimistic modifications. The actor continued:
Speaking a few system that was arrange centuries in the past that none of us are accountable for, however all of us are accountable for altering. It is greater than topical; it is necessary. And I believe that it needs to be stated that the system would not want a aware operator, it would not want people who find themselves feeding it. It simply needs to be left alone. It simply needs to be good folks [who] do not do something for it to proceed to function because it was arrange. I believe that us being trustworthy about that, concerning the formation of such programs and the way the buildings work towards our collective good, that needs to be a dialog that reaches our dwelling rooms. And I believe that if we are able to spark the dialog that might maybe spark the change, then I believe we have achieved our jobs.
Whereas it is a lot too early to say if Regulation & Order will air extra episodes that study the shortcomings of the system via the views of characters (together with Mehcad Brooks’ Jalen Shaw), I am prepared to start out crossing my fingers. It is a procedural present, however Regulation & Order shifting on to a distinct case every week does not imply solely tackling a sure subject as soon as. On the entire, between revisiting my dialog with Brooks and celebrating the information that TV reveals can lastly begin manufacturing, I am feeling freshly longing for Season 23.
For now, you possibly can at all times revisit “The System” in addition to each different episode of Season 22 streaming with a Peacock Premium subscription. Regulation & Order will return with new episodes sooner or later within the 2024 TV schedule, and it is only a matter of ready to search out out when.
