Why ‘Law & Order’ Creator Dick Wolf Wanted Chris Meloni Back in Franchise

After a 10 year hiatus, Chris Meloni is making his return to the Law & Order universe as Detective Elliot Stabler, though he won’t be giving viewers the same hot-head character they’ve come to know and love on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Meloni will be headlining the new Law & Order spinoff: Organized Crime, which is scheduled to premiere on April 1. As a beloved entity and former partner of Detective Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), show creator and showrunner Dick Wolf said he’s wanted to reunite with Meloni “since the day he left” the series. “Elliot Stabler is tough as nails, he has an infallible moral compass, and he is the cop we wish shows up if you ever need one,” Wolf tells Entertainment Weekly.

Meloni left the series due to contract disagreements in 2011 and in the meantime, he worked in a number of different series (The Handmaid’s Tale, True Blood, Happy!). For years, fans were convinced the star would never come back to the show — and Meloni’s past comments didn’t lend to any thoughts otherwise. He tells EW he didn’t miss SVU much at all in his absence. “I would have no problem admitting to it. But I was pleasantly surprised it played out as well as it did. Because, you know, that’s not how life shakes out, right? You can have all the dreams you want, all the preconceived notions of how it’s going to be. But I must say, the intervening decade was everything I could have hoped for,” he said.

He also says there were many reasons he wanted to come back after Wolf approached him with an offer he couldn’t refuse. “If you have, at least from my perspective, a very well-known and beloved TV character who left abruptly and, I would argue, unceremoniously… there’s a built-in recognizability, a thing that needs to be satiated with a sense of closure. Those are all very attractive things,” says Meloni, who has remained close with the überproducer. The actor knew coming back to fight New York crime on TV was the right decision once he put on badge 6313 again. “It felt great, a surprising sense of freedom,” he says. “It was a very interesting feeling because I rarely get it. It was just kind of a weird sign that everything’s right, and I was where I belonged.”