When Wolf Entertainment announced that Sam Waterston was leaving Law & Order, it seemed like a death knell for the NBC revival—but then it was revealed that Tony Goldwyn will be replacing him. And that, frankly, is the best possible news that Law & Order fans could have hoped for.
As painful as Waterston’s departure is going to be (maybe that’s why Wolf waited to announce it until just weeks before his last episode), that’s how exciting it is to hear that Goldwyn is coming aboard. It’s not only because he’s immediately recognizable to broadcast TV viewers from his run as President Fitzgerald “Fitz” Grant III on ABC’s Scandal. Not only because he’s a two-time Screen Actors Guild Award nominee with an insanely long resume. But most importantly, he’s an actor who takes projects up a notch every time he appears, and that’s what Law & Order desperately needs.
Sam Waterston is a national treasure and by virtue of playing Jack McCoy for almost 30 years—his first episode aired on Sept. 21, 1994 and his last episode is on Feb. 22, 2024—became the spine of NBC’s long-running crime drama. Waterston gave fans consistency, and consistent excellence. But when the series was revived in 2022, he wound up having most of it on his shoulders. He was one of just two legacy actors to return, and Anthony Anderson left after the first new season. As for McCoy, the character who’d once been so delightfully prickly was starting to feel tired. Charlie Skinner from The Newsroom would’ve kicked Jack McCoy’s butt.
Sam Waterston’s going to go on and find another character to be amazing with. Law & Order, on the other hand, has to have someone who can inject the energy it’s been lacking since Waterston and Linus Roache used to square off every week.
Linus Roache isn’t walking back in that courtroom door; after how much Law & Order: SVU changed his character Michael Cutter, that’s for the best. What the original series has is a character who could be a lot like Cutter—played by Roache’s Homeland co-star Hugh Dancy. There have been a fair amount of online complaints that Dancy doesn’t fit in the role of Executive Assistant District Attorney Nolan Price, and that’s because the role doesn’t fit him. Anyone who’s seen him in other shows like Hannibal and The Path knows what he can do; heck, Homeland practically had him twirling David Zabel’s villainous mustache and he was still great. Law & Order set Dancy up to be Roache’s successor, but it’s only in the current Season 23 that we’ve seen glimpses of him being able to cut loose.
In Season 23, Episode 2, “Human Innovation,” Price rightfully argued that the D.A.’s Office shouldn’t be introducing potentially fraudulent evidence, but seemed to be the only one seriously bothered by it. Then in Season 23, Episode 3, “Turn the Page,” he was willing to skewer new detective Vincent Reilly, telling McCoy that convicting a serial killer was more important than damaging their relationship with the police. These were moments of real energy and real tension, showing just what Dancy can do if Price is allowed to go out on a limb. Price needs to be able to really, truly fight for something the way Cutter did and Ben Stone did in Law & Order‘s early years. And to do that, he needs a new sparring partner.
When McCoy was elevated to District Attorney and Cutter came on the scene, McCoy’s perspective changed, as was supposed to now that he was in charge of the entire office. This ideological shift even came up in Season 19, Episode 5, “Falling,” when Cutter pointed out a similarity between his latest legal move and something that McCoy had done all the way back in Season 5. In Seasons 18-20, McCoy was there to keep Cutter in check, but it wasn’t an absolute. The two had spirited debates and Cutter still did a lot of things that were not only genuine surprises for Law & Order, but genuinely different from any other courtroom drama. In Seasons 21 and beyond, there hasn’t been a real back and forth; a viewer only needs to look at the scene from “Human Innovation” to see how one-dimensional the dynamic in the D.A.’s Office has become.
Tony Goldwyn stands every chance of fixing that and getting into some real battles with Hugh Dancy. Tony Goldwyn cannot play a character who stands still. Everyone is talking about his Law & Order casting in relation to his work on Scandal, and to a lesser extent, his recurring role as Detective Robert Goren’s brother Frank on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. But he’s portrayed some very intense and even unpredictable parts, too—in two episodes of Without a Trace, he played both a man and the man’s murderous twin brother. In National Geographic’s docudrama The Hot Zone: Anthrax, his nuanced but also chilling approach to Dr. Bruce Ivins was more frightening than the anthrax. And in 2014 he created, alongside Richard LaGravenese, one of television’s most incredible legal dramas called The Divide. He’s not creating anything here, but as a storyteller, director and an actor, Goldwyn goes beyond making just good entertainment. He makes things that are memorable.
Law & Order is built around a very specific formula, but Goldwyn is going to come into that formula and upend it. He can take the limitations of the District Attorney position—not being in the courtroom, only having a handful of scenes in any given episode—and get the absolute most out of them. If the Law & Order creative team writes for Goldwyn and makes his new District Attorney someone with personality and not just political savvy, then he’s going to make those office strategy meetings a lot more interesting. He and Dancy are going to butt heads. They could even get some genuinely entertaining banter developing. And with a more dynamic D.A. character at the top, pushing and maybe even surprising the people who work underneath him, there’s going to be more energy running through the entire second half of the show. Fans will have to see how Odelya Halevi’s A.D.A. Samantha Maroun reacts to Goldwyn’s character, because Price being stuck has a certain knock-on effect. If Goldwyn’s presence gives Dancy more room to run, then she’ll have more directions to go in, too.
And this series needs a clear direction. The original success of Law & Order wasn’t the formula. It was that there was genuine drama, often with something to say. Ben Stone had a true passion for justice that Michael Moriarty was able to bring out, and it felt like the show itself had a personality and an opinion—one you didn’t have to agree with, but it was food for thought. McCoy wasn’t as noble as Stone, but Waterston could chew the heck out of the scenery and provoke a reaction. Then Cutter came along and was the perfect combination of the two: an utter wild card driven by a fierce desire to do the right thing. The show has to have someone like that again.
It needs to have a voice again. Having “ripped from the headlines” stories doesn’t make it timely; what made it relevant was what it did with those stories. Bringing in Tony Goldwyn is a chance for Law & Order to break out of its own mold. To inject a new perspective. To give Hugh Dancy some more creative freedom so that he can reach his full potential. To give viewers something to start talking about, because they won’t be entirely sure what’s going to happen. They’ll have something to look forward to. Sam Waterston’s a hard act to follow, but Tony Goldwyn is the right man to do it—and with him, Law & Order has a chance to catapult itself back into greatness.
Law & Order airs Thursdays at 8:00 p.m. on NBC.
