Until this week, it had been 12 years since Law & Order, the crime procedural that spawned a world of spinoffs and entrenched the perspective of police and prosecutors on television, aired a new episode.
A lot has changed since the flagship show, which premiered on NBC in 1990 and returned to the network for its 21st season on Thursday, went on hiatus in 2010. (For one, the 20th season finale was about a menacing blog.) Crime procedurals – shows in which law enforcement solve a case over the course of a single episode – remain popular; they composed six of the top 10 most-watched scripted broadcast shows in 2020. Law & Order’s most successful spinoff, Special Victims Unit, is now the longest-running live-action primetime series in history with 23 seasons. But a decade’s worth of video evidence of racist police brutality, particularly against Black Americans, has put TV shows where police are always the protagonists under fair scrutiny.
