Law & Order: Stabler Explains SVU Exit In New Crossover Clip

Ten years after leaving the SVU, Christopher Meloni‘s Elliot Stabler has some explaining to do, and now, a new teaser for the upcoming Law & Order: Special Victims Unit spinoff Law & Order: Organized Crime sees Stabler trying to explain his sudden departure to his former friend and colleague Fin Tutuola (Ice T) and while the teaser doesn’t explain what happened regarding his departure, he does reveal that he hadn’t reached out in all this time because he was waiting for the right moment only for the right moment to seemingly not come. You can check out the new teaser, which was shared to Twitter on Friday, below.

Set to debut on April 1st, Law & Order: Organized Crime will see Stabler returning to the NYPD to take on, as the title suggests, organized crime after a mysterious but devastating loss. However, having been away for around a decade, a lot has changed so Stabler will have to adapt to those changes and work within a criminal justice system that itself is dealing with its own time of reckoning. On top of that, Stabler will need to deal with his professional challenges while also trying to rebuild his own life and lead a task force set on taking these extremely powerful organizations down.

Law & Order: Organized Crime was originally intended to premiere as part of NBC’s Fall 2020 schedule and would have included a crossover event with Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but it was delayed due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. However, the SVU reunion will not air on April 1st surrounding the premiere of Organized Crime.

“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 previous 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.”

Law & Order: Organized Crime will debut on Thursday, April 1st on NBC.

Are you excited to see Christopher Meloni return as Elliot Stabler? Let us know in the comments.