Law & Order: SVU’s Christopher Meloni to Guest Star on Bless the Harts

FOX’s Bless the Harts is about to be visited by a TV icon. According to a new report from Entertainment Tonight, Law & Order: SVU and Happy alum Christopher Meloni is set to guest star on the hit series in its upcoming second season. Meloni’s episode, which is expected to debut in 2021, will see him voicing Detective Voccola, who is described as an “explosive, world-weary detective who’s sick of it all and has seen it all… until he meets a woman who claims to be Betty Hart”, played by Maya Rudolph in the series.

Bless the Harts follows a group of people living in the South who are poor in money, but rich in family and friends. In addition to Rudolph, the series stars Kristen Wiig as Jenny Hart, Jillian Bell as Violet Hart, Ike Barinholtz as Wayne Edwards, and Kumail Nanjiani as Jesus Christ. Meloni will join a cast of Season 2 guest stars that include Ken Jeong, Natasha Lyonne, and Kristen Schaal.

Bless the Harts will mark the next return to TV for Meloni, who is also set to return as Detective Elliot Stabler in a new Law & Order spinoff called Law & Order: Organized Crime. Meloni was also expected to return in the Law & Order: SVU season premiere, but that is currently being put on hold until Organized Crime can debut in 2021.

“We had heard distant thunder about Chris Meloni coming back in the fall and we were going to lay a little groundwork for that,” SVU showrunner Warren Leight said in a recent interview. “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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