Dick Wolf has Law and Order: Hate Crimes ordered by NBC

Dick Wolf is getting yet another Law and Order spinoff as NBC has approved Law and Order: Hate Crimes for a first season.

Dick Wolf said last month that he wanted more TV series on the air, and NBC is granting his wish by ordering another Law and Order series.

The network announced Tuesday that Law and Order: Hate Crimes has been ordered directly to series. It will have a backdoor pilot during the upcoming season of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, before airing its own 13-episode first season.

Dates for either the backdoor pilot or series premiere were not announced. There are currently no cast members attached either.

All that’s known is that the series is co-created by Dick Wolf and Warren Leight, a longtime Wolf collaborator who previously served as SVU showrunner.

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Together, the duo are crafting a series based on the real-life NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force, which is part of the Special Victims Unit.

According to Tuesday’s press release, the task force “works under the NYPD’s real Special Victims Unit and often borrows SVU’s detectives to assist in their investigations.”

That presumably means that there will be regular opportunities for Hate Crimes to cross over with SVU, similar to what Wolf has been able to build with the One Chicago franchise.

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The new series is an interesting development for TV fans. Wolf’s two most recent series, Chicago Justice and Law and Order: True Crime, both only aired one season. NBC cancelled the former, and while True Crime hasn’t been officially axed, the lack of any word about its future plus Wolf moving on to Law and Order: Hate Crimes suggests that it won’t be back either.

Yet, despite that recent track record, Wolf and NBC are serving up another show—and one that has a guaranteed first season, at that. (Perhaps because the producer’s last planned SVU spinoff, FBI, saw NBC pass on it and CBS snatch it up as a standalone show instead?)

There’s also the question of how Law and Order: Hate Crimes will work on-screen. Since the actual unit is part of SVU, how does the spinoff establish the new characters as a group viewers want to watch, without getting overshadowed by the other series? Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) would be the overall boss of both squads, and she’s a pretty prominent character.

Whoever is picked to lead the new ensemble would be both their boss and also Olivia Benson’s subordinate, and the worst thing for a new series would be if it just felt like the B-team to SVU.

But it sounds like Hate Crimes is still very early on in the development stage, so audiences will have to wait and see about casting—and how closely this new Law and Order spinoff follows real life.

Not to mention, how it does in the TV ratings. It will be the seventh series with the brand name on NBC (after the original, SVU, Criminal Intent, Trial By Jury, Los Angeles and True Crime) and eighth overall (when you include Conviction). Of that group, only the first three have made it into a second season.

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