About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Law & Order franchise

Encyclopedia : L : LA : LAW : Law & Order franchise

The Law & Order franchise describes a number of related NBC television shows created by Dick Wolf, all of which deal with some aspect of the New York City criminal justice system.


Law & Order franchise
Law & Order>Original series






Crime & Punishment

Shared people and resources in a common fictional setting are the connecting links between the shows, e.g., Hudson University and the New York Ledger tabloid newspaper. Many supporting characters, such as district attorneys, psychologists and medical examiners are also shared among the shows. Occasionally, crossovers of main characters and/or shared storylines between two of the shows will occur. A few major characters have also left the cast of one show within the franchise only to eventually join another.

With some frequency, actors have appeared on the various series that make up the franchise, usually as different (sometimes very different) characters. This is to be expected since all the shows are filmed in the New York City area and thus draw from the same pool of actors. Some prominent examples are Diane Neal playing a female rapist in an earlier season of ' before becoming the ADA (assistant district attorney) for that series, Annabella Sciorra playing a criminal defense attorney in ' and later Detective Mike Logan's (Chris Noth) partner in , as well as Jerry Orbach playing a defense attorney on the original series before joining it as Det. Lennie Briscoe (who despises criminal lawyers).

The music, style and credits of the shows tend to be similar. The original Law & Order, ' and ' arguably contain the most visual similarities within the franchise. Past episodes are highly successful in syndication with TNT, USA Network, and Bravo showing episodes sometimes up to 6 times a day.

Contents

Series

Current Series

Law & Order
Enlarge
Law & Order

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
Enlarge
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

Law & Order: Criminal Intent
Enlarge
Law & Order: Criminal Intent

Past Series

Related shows

TV movie

The Law & Order franchise has one TV movie, (1998) starring Chris Noth as Mike Logan.

Characters

Current franchise cast as of 2005, part 1
Enlarge
Current franchise cast as of 2005, part 1

Current franchise cast as of 2005, part 2
Enlarge
Current franchise cast as of 2005, part 2

Current characters in the franchise

Past characters in the franchise

Crossovers between series

As of 2006, there are only seven crossovers in which characters from one L&O series meet characters from another L&O series. This is excluding characters who have switched shows (such as Don Cragen and Mike Logan) and characters which the franchise shares among the shows, such as medical examiners and district attorneys. The crossover episodes are the following:

Earlier, Law & Order had made three crossovers with another NBC show, (1993):

Parodies

Games

There are three computer games based on the original Law & Order. The player must investigate crimes and then prosecute the resulting cases:

There is also one computer game based on . While it shares many similarities with the other Law & Order games, the Criminal Intent game focuses more on investigations and interrogations, not prosecution.

Trivia

External links

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: