Here's a bright spot in the wasteland the TV is becoming as the writers' strike drags on: NBC's Law & Order is returning with all-new episodes on Wednesday, January 2, at 9pm (Eastern Time) with a two-hour season premiere. The second-longest-running drama series in TV history, L&O is entering its 18th season as it has so many others before: with cast changes. Detective Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin) has a new partner in Detective Cyrus Lupo (Jeremy Sisto); Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) is now the district attorney, and filling his shoes on the day-to-day business of prosecuting the accused is Chief A.D.A Michael Cutter (Linus Roache).

Roache and Sisto, along with series creator, executive producer, and writer Dick Wolf, spoke to the press the other day about the challenges of joining a show with such a long history.

Roache: One of the joys of joining the show for me has been working for Sam [Waterston] to build this wonderful and beautiful and complex relationship [between the characters]. He gets mad at me. I think there's respect there for me. I have a lot of respect for him. There's competition; there's admiration.

Sisto: Basically my character starts off the show coming back from overseas having worked in Intel for a while. He starts out fairly meek and kind of reserved. And over the course of being inundated with the New York City detective lifestyle, he becomes more hard. And there's kind of an arc that has to do with that. And he's taking night school classes and trying to learn as much on his own about the legal system.

Roache: My character is almost aggressively pursuing justice. And prepared to go almost over the line, nearly go outside the law for the sake of justice. There's a kind of edge to him that I like. He's not an easy kind of guy all the time, which I think creates a kind of interesting tension. He's very much like I saw in all the DAs that I got to meet. In real life these people really are living for their work because it's beyond just doing a job. And it's interesting his name is Cutter. There's a cutting edge to him that I'm very much enjoying playing.

Sisto: Sometimes I feel like I'm at Disneyland -- they have those cutouts you can put your face through. And I'm putting my face through into Law & Order. I think it's so funny that I'm on this show that literally has spanned the life of my career. The pilot was in '88, right around the time I did my first movie. It's like knowing somebody else's career like a fellow actor. And years down the road you finally get to work together.

Wolf: Jeremy and Linus are the 23rd and 24th actors in a six-person ensemble. I consider these two changes the most significant since the fourth year of the show when Epatha and Jill Hennessey came in and brought some progesterone as opposed to the pure testosterone of the first three seasons. If you look back two years, there were great actors in the show. But Dennis Farina was in his early 60s. Fred [Thompson] was in his 60s. And Sam was in his 60s. Jeremy is 33 and Linus is 43... We've taken literally about 50 years out of the demo. And I think that that's a significant [change] more than a refreshment of the show. I think it is the next generation of the show quite literally.

MaryAnn Johanson (email me)
reviews, reviews, reviews! at FlickFilosopher.com

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