“On the streets of the city, there are those who commit crimes and there are those who stop them.” Sounds like the serious, sober opening for a Dick Wolf police procedural, right? No, NBC marketers would tell you, but thanks for playing our game. Ripped from the headlines — or, rather, the opening titles of a Law & Ord…

Under a new long-term deal between Ion Media and NBCUniversal Television Distribution, the first five seasons of Dick Wolf drama Chicago P.D. will air on Ion Television starting in early 2019. The deal also will bring all three Law & Order franchises to the Ion airwaves. Season 17 of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit…

Jan Maxwell, a supremely gifted comic actress whose five Tony Award nominations included two in the same season, died today of cancer, her son, William Maxwell-Lunny, confirmed. She was 61. Maxwell was both talented and beloved, known for her professionalism and timing, whether it was for a sly patrician snarl or a…

Jack McCoy is returning to the Law & Order fold. Sam Waterston, who played prosecutor Jack McCoy for 16 seasons on NBC’s mothership Law & Order, will reprise his role in a guest appearance on Law & Order: SVU later this season. No other details were revealed. Created by prolific, Emmy-winning producer Dick Wolf, Law…

Larry Sherman, a veteran film and television character actor who got to pal around with football greats Doug Flutie, Herschel Walker and Jim Kelly when owner Donald Trump hired him as spokesman for his short-lived USFL New Jersey Generals football team, died August 26 at a hospice in Melville, NY. His son Charles, a…

Ed Sherin, an Emmy winner who executive produced more than 160 Law & Order episodes, directed three dozen and acted in and/or directed more than 20 Broadway shows during his six-decade career, has died. He was 87. Sherin was a DGA member for nearly half a century and was a former National VP. The guild announced his…

Tonight, Fox’s long-running animated powerhouse The Simpsons joins a very exclusive club of U.S. scripted primetime shows when its 600th episode, “Treehouse of Horror XXVII” airs. How rare is this club? The only other scripted primetime show to reach 600 episodes is Gunsmoke, which ran for 20 seasons on CBS from 1955…

Fred Thompson, former U.S. senator and longtime actor in the TV series Law & Order has died. Thompson, who died in Nashville after a recurrence of lymphoma, was 73, according to a statement released today by his family. Thompson was born in 1942 in Sheffield, Alabama but grew up across the state line in Lawrenceburg…

Can Dick Wolf sustain the whole “ripped from the headlines” thing for the latest in his Chicago series franchise, reporters wondered this afternoon at the TCA Summer Press Tour. "The Ebola story was obvious because it was a matter of great concern,” but what are the other ripped-from-the-headlines medical stories out…

Between senior citizens and digital-brained teens, tweens and tots are the befuddled middle-agers trying to make sense of it all—while texting at the same time. Anthony Anderson, 44, takes this bafflement to new heights in Black-ish as Andre "Dre" Johnson, caught between his old-school "Pops" (Laurence Fishburne) from…

It was May 2010. NBC’s Law & Order was eying a place in the history books with a 21st-season pickup, which would’ve broken a tie with Gunsmoke and make L&O the longest-running drama series ever. The mothership series also had just spawned a third spinoff series, L&O: Los Angeles, which had been ordered to series…

EXCLUSIVE: After rebooting Heroes as a 13-episode miniseries Heroes Reborn, I hear NBC is looking to bring back its longest-running drama series, Law & Order. Network sources caution that this is an idea that has been discussed from time to time, and a Law & Order limited series is not in active development at the…