To unravel this mystery, we first reached out to reps for NBCUniversal, which produced the show and controls the streaming rights. That’s why it’s so confounding, more than four years after its Netflix exit, that L&O remains a digital ghost.ġ1 Actors Who Starred in 'Law & Order' Before They Were Famous
Plus, as noted, Hulu is also home to SVU, making it (at least in theory) a logical contender to also carry that show’s predecessor. Indeed, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu both have rich libraries of classic shows, with the latter proving to be particularly aggressive of late in snatching up popular faves of yore long missing from streaming, including ER and The Golden Girls. For example, The Wonder Years left Netflix in the fall of 2017 after a six-year run, only to pop up on Hulu a year later. Classic series come and go from the streamer regularly, either because Netflix decides it no longer wants to pay an outside studio to license the show, or because said studio gets a better offer from a rival platform. That L&O would leave Netflix back in 2014 isn’t particularly surprising. (For the frugal, reruns of the original series can be seen on the Ion broadcast network or on cable via AMC Networks–owned channels We and Sundance, the latter of which offer a handful of rotating episodes for streaming on demand.) And then they just vanished, forcing die-hard fans who wanted on-demand access to the OG L&O crew to either buy digital downloads of each episode or to pay $300 for the full series DVD collection.
Up until late 2014, the first eight seasons of the show were a staple on Netflix.
While music rights and the costs associated with making an older show ready for the digital age have delayed or prevented some classic series from landing a streaming home (or even launching on DVD), those aren’t factors with Law & Order. Unfortunately, the usual culprits don’t seem to apply with Law & Order. Like any good detective, we began our hunt for the truth by ruling out any obvious suspects in The Case of Where’s L&O? After all, this isn’t the first time the chief - er, our editor - has assigned us to the missing-shows beat. It’s a pop-culture crime, one which demands solving. But the mothership, the series which launched Dick Wolf’s ever-expanding empire of procedural dramas back in 1990, remains stubbornly absent from any subscription video-on-demand service. Law & Order spinoff SVU, while slowly disappearing from Netflix, is available to stream in its entirety on Hulu. It’s a mystery worthy of Detective Lennie Briscoe: Why isn’t the original Law & Order - the flagship series in what’s arguably the most successful TV brand ever created - currently available on any American streaming platform? Virtually every other big show launched in the 1990s, from ER and Friends to Seinfeld and The X-Files, has now found a digital home. Photo: Universal Tv/Wolf Film/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
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