‘Law & Order: Organized Crime’: 4 Reasons to Be Excited About Move to Peacock for Season 5

Sure, it won’t be the same now that there won’t be Law & Order Thursdays on NBC anymore, with Found taking over the third hour of the night with the original and SVU, but that doesn’t mean the move to Peacock is a bad thing for Law & Order: Organized Crime (the subscription fee aside).

The newest series in the franchise was the only one not renewed when NBC announced it was bringing back Law & Order, SVU, and the One Chicago series for the 2024-2025 season in March 2024. Then rumors started to circulate that Organized Crime could be moving to Peacock for Season 5, and that became official in May one week ahead of the finale. And yes, that does leave us a bit worried about the ease at which it will be to continue to bring former partners Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Detective Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) back onscreen together, but rather than focus on what we’ll be losing, we’re taking a look at why this move could be a good thing for the series below.

The tone and format are made for streaming.

Because of the nature of the cases for the Organized Crime Control Bureau, this is the grittiest, darkest show of the current trio, and we can only imagine what being on streaming will allow for there going forward. (Think Criminal Minds: Evolution getting even more disturbing on Paramount+.)

While Law & Order and SVU, for the most part, have cases of the week, Organized Crime has moved away from that into more serialized stories, with multi-episode arcs. With longer seasons, that has meant more than one arc a season. But with seasons of streaming shows tending to be 10 episodes—an official count for Season 5 has yet to be announced—there could easily just be one or two with one leading into the other.

And while episodes could stay near 40-42 minutes, as they ran on NBC due to commercials, that doesn’t have to be true anymore. That should work especially well for this show.

There will still be crossovers.

For its first four seasons, Organized Crime aired after SVU, which made it quite easy to have a two-hour event crossover. Their cases easily bleed into one another, and who doesn’t love having Benson and Stabler back together onscreen? But just because that will presumably no longer be the case—episodes usually drop on streaming services at midnight PT, but drop times have been changing—doesn’t mean losing that seamless transition from one episode to the next across shows takes away the possibility of crossovers.

In fact, Meloni has revealed that he’s writing the second episode of Season 5—and fans will love who’s going to show up. “I know [Olivia] Benson will be with OC for a moment there,” he told People. “I’m going to have an opportunity to… hopefully, uncover, peel away a little bit more of the onion or uncover a little more depth of feeling between them.”

So while we have a feeling that getting another two-part crossover event like there have been in the past may not be in the cards, we do know that we’ll see Benson and Stabler sharing the screen at least once in the upcoming season.

Stabler can curse now!

Let’s be real: From his time on SVU, Stabler has been a character whose body language screams “f**k” at times. It may be a minor thing but let’s embrace that he’ll be able to say it now.

History suggests the show should stay the same — and get better.
Organized Crime is far from the first show to move from a network to a streaming service; Evil and SEAL Team first aired on CBS before going over to Paramount+. In both cases, the heart of the shows remained the same—they could just lean more into things they couldn’t on network television, such as profanity, horror, and in SEAL Team‘s case the gruesome nature of a potentially life-ending injury. There’s been nothing to suggest the same won’t be true for Organized Crime.

But what do you think? Are you looking forward to Organized Crime being on Peacock? Let us know in the comments section, below.