CHRISTOPHER Meloni will return to Law & Order: SVU ahead of his series spinoff role.
Fans can expect to see his character, Elliot Stabler, on the series’ season 22 premier.
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In the latest episode of The Law & Order: SVU Podcast, showrunner Warren Leight revealed: “It’s pretty clear that Elliot will be in the SVU season opener.”
He went on: “I think that much I know. Whether we get to see his family as well remains to be seen.”
Chris left SVU in 2011 with Elliot retiring from the New York Police Department.
During his years on the show he starred opposite Mariska Hargitay as Olivia Benson.
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According to Warren and other writers the plan had been to gradually bring Elliot, and his family, back on to Law & Order.
Warren said: “We had heard distant thunder about Chris Meloni coming back in the fall and we were going to lay a little groundwork for that.
“We were going to see [his wife] Kathy Stabler come back very upset.
“Her son had been rolled by a team of ne’er-do-wells and may have been drugged, and we were going to revisit [Benson’s half-brother] Simon’s seeming overdose and we were going to get to know the stresses on the Stablers — what had happened to the Stabler family after Elliot both left SVU and apparently left them.”
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This easing in was supposed to begin in the final few episodes of the current season.
But season 21 was curtailed by the coronavirus pandemic, which saw the death of a SVU crew member, and production came to a halt on the show.
Warren went on: “We were just going to lay some groundwork down in anticipation of Elliot’s return of course in his own series.
“We had the sense that the first episode of next year for SVU was going to bring Elliot back, so we were going to foreshadow that and explain a little more what happened to Simon”
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The SVU season premier will determine how Elliot’s spin off series launches, in which he runs the NYPD’s Organized Crime Division.
Warren added the SVU opener will forecast “how much crossover will there be between Elliot and Olivia as the season goes on.”
Law & Order: SVU has been renewed through season 24.
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