Law & Order: Organized Crime is getting busted down to Peacock

Christopher Meloni Photo: Gregory Pace You know how, in cop shows, detectives are always getting threatened with being busted back down to foot patrol or whatever—a demotion to a world of decreased relevance, lower pay, and less chance at anyone actually seeing anything they do? Well, NBC announced tonight that Christopher Meloni’s Law & Order: Organized Crime is getting moved from the network over to its streaming service Peacock. Which is good news for everybody, probably; we don’t know why we even brought up that first part, about the obvious demotion to a less prestigious position. Simple slip of the fingers, we guess.Anyway, in a development that genuinely shocked us, news that the the cop series would begin its fifth season over in streaming land was not accompanied by an announcement that the show would also be getting a new showrunner; Organized Crime has had an infamous case of musical head writers over its three years on TV, but Deadline reports that season 4 showrunner John Shiban will stay on in the job, being the first Organized Crime showrunner to survive on the series for more than a season since its first, Ilene Chaiken, departed at the end of season 2. Shiban will oversee a transition that will take Detective Elliot Stabler onto the streaming airwaves, and also into a world of having a handful fewer adventures, what with the show’s season 5 order being cut back to just 10 installments. (From 13 for its most recent season, and 22 apiece for the two seasons before.)Organized Crime follows Meloni and Stabler into the world of serialized TV, telling longer stories than those that the usual Law & Order machine typically delivers. Which is probably, as noted by Deadline, why it performs the worst out of the various NBC Dick Wolf shows (the two other Law & Orders, and the various Chicago shows) on linear TV, but actually does pretty well for itself in a binge-friendly environment like Peacock—helping to explain why it’s the one that’s getting sacrificed here to the power of the streaming gods.