Law & Order Star Jesse L. Martin “Hopes” to Return in Revival

The Flash star Jesse L. Martin hopes he gets to return to the world of Law & Order when NBC rolls out their revival of the long-running procedural series. Martin played Detective Ed Green on the series for more than 200 episodes from 1999 until 2008. While TV Line reports there are no talks with Martin currently ongoing, there’s not much reason to assume he couldn’t return, assuming he and the network can make scheduling and money work. While the long wait between seasons has many fans calling it a reboot, Law & Order is treating this like “season 21,” although that’s not to say that the show will be picking up right where it left off in 2010. 

One of the great brands in broadcast TV, Law & Order would be the longest live-action, scripted primetime show in U.S. television history, if not for its spinoff, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. To have numerous shows all running for more than ten years under the same production team and banner is wild, especially when you consider that the world the shows take place in actually goes all the way back to 1990, and crossed over with non-Law & Order-branded series like Homicide: Life on the Street.

“I certainly hope so. There were a lot of loose ends when Ed Green left the scene, if you will,” Martin said during an appearance on The Talk, adding, “Yes, maybe.”

Per TV Line’s piece, NBC declined to comment. With the return of Sam Waterston’s Jack McCoy, it’s clear the new episodes will not distance themselves from the beloved original series, but that also means plenty of the actors who played in the originals are opening up to say they wouldn’t mind another bite at the apple a decade later.

Last month, Vincent D’Onofrio told ComicBook that he would like a chance to return as well.

“I’ve made it clear to Dick Wolf that I would come back if he wanted to do a streaming six to ten or 13 episodes, I would be totally into it,” D’Onofrio told ComicBook. “To play a more mature Robert Goren would be really fun, and Warren Leight, who writes Special Victims Unit, was one of my favorite writers on Criminal Intent. I think he would be great, and also Chris Brancado, who writes The Godfather of Harlem, we first met on the last eight episodes of Law & Order. Yeah, I’d like to revisit it, but that’s up to Dick Wolf. I’ve made it very clear to him that I would, so that’s up to him, I really have no say in that.”

Besides returning star Sam Waterston, Law & Order‘s return will star returning star Anthony Anderson (black-ish) as Det. Kevin Bernard; Jeffrey Donovan (Burn Notice) a police officer; Hugh Dancy (Hannibal, The Path) as an assistant district attorney; Camryn Manheim (The Practice) as Lt. Kate Dixon; and Oldelya Halevi (Good Trouble) as assistant district attorney Samantha Maroun.