The winter hiatus for NBC’s Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU is nearly over with the upcoming start of the 2026 TV schedule, and the two dramas will follow their fall finales up with a crossover event. While the promo included enough to hype SVU fans over the return of Ice-T’s Fin, Law & Order showrunner Rick Eid has dropped some details for what to expect from the case that requires two hours.
The two Dick Wolf TV universe shows return to NBC on Thursday, January 8 for a two-parter. Law & Order kicks off the evening as usual at 8 p.m. ET, with an episode that involves Brady when she witnesses a crime and an injured woman goes missing from the hospital.
This will result in her working with Special Victims, with TVLine reporting that an “explosive discovery” will put the squads of both series “in danger.” Rick Eid spoke with the outlet first about what brings Brady and Benson together for the crossover, after some tension in their previous crossover in the 2025 TV schedule:
[Maura Tierney, who plays Brady, and Mariska Hargitay, who plays Benson] both like working together. So it was just like, let’s get these two powerful women together, working together, seeing it from different perspectives. It’s one of those things you talk about and then you go, ‘Oh let’s try to break this story with that in mind.’ It kind of came together, and we ran with it.
In the previous crossover in the spring of 2025, the two NYPD bosses got off on the wrong foot when Benson got too personally invested in the case of the week and overstepped on Brady’s usual turf. Based on what Rick Eid said, the actresses enjoy sharing scenes together, and the upcoming two-parter will lean into that. It does presumably mean that the crime that Brady witnesses will tie to a sexually-based offense if it brings Special Victims into the mix.
This two-parter won’t just come across as two normal episodes of Law & Order and SVU either that happen to overlap a bit, according to the former’s showrunner. On the subject of how literally explosive the promo for the crossover is, he previewed the higher stakes:
When you try to do these two-hour, movie-type things, there’s a certain amount of energy and action and ‘event’ to it, [that] you need to pull off. We try to make these crossovers events. They’re obviously different than a typical episode of ‘Law & Order’ or ‘Law & Order: SVU.’ We try to elevate the storytelling, elevate the production. I guess that’s a long way of saying: Yes, there are a lot of explosions and action sequences. [Laughs]
All things considered, it seems like this might be the crossover with the highest stakes within the franchise since the Law & Order: SVU/Law & Order: Organized Crime event in 2023 that ended in the death of a series regular. That’s not to say that fans should expect a main character to die in the upcoming event, but a lot more seems to be at stake for New York City than the last time that Mariska Hargitay‘s Benson and Maura Tierney’s Brady teamed up.
The two women were a formidable duo by the end of that first crossover, so it should be interesting to see how they operate this time around. Check out the promo below:
The crossover will also kick off the beginning of the winter half of the 2025-2026 TV season, which will see Law & Order: Organized Crime Season 5 replaced by The Hunting Party Season 2 on Thursday nights after SVU. Leading lady Melissa Roxburgh shared why The Hunting Party is a great option to stream via a Peacock subscription ahead of the second season, and I’m curious to see if the numbers for Law & Order: Organized Crime will carry over for the new season of the Manifest vet’s crime drama.
For now, with the days counting down until NBC’s crossover event on January 8, you can always use that Peacock subscription to revisit earlier episodes of Law & Order and SVU. Both shows are also available with a Hulu subscription if Peacock isn’t an option.
