NBC's Law & Order Franchise Is Growing Again, This Time With a Series About Hate Crimes

The world was apparently running low on Law & Orderseries, so NBC picked up a new 13-episode spin-off! The latest addition to Dick Wolf's empire will be called Law & Order: Hate Crimes, and it will be based on New York's actual Hate Crimes Task Force. Man, who knew creating a TV show was so easy?

Here's NBC's official description of the show: "Law & Order: Hate Crimes is set in New York City, where crimes motivated by discrimination are vigorously investigated by an elite, specially trained team of investigators. Going behind the headlines and viral videos, these diverse, dedicated and passionate detectives will stop at nothing to bring these criminals to justice."

We can practically hear the ominous intro now!

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Anyway, the new unit will be introduced during the latter part of Law & Order: Special Victim's Unit's 20th season. According to Wolf, using SVU -- which was originally called Sex Crimes -- as a springboard for the new series was a conscious choice since he hopes to accomplish the same kind of awareness with this series as he did when he launched SVU.

"Twenty years ago when SVU began, very few people felt comfortable coming forward and reporting these crimes," said Wolf in a statement, "but when you bring the stories into people's living rooms -- with characters as empathetic as Olivia Benson -- a real dialogue can begin. That's what I hope we can do with this new show in a world where hate crimes have reached an egregious level."

Law & Order: SVU returns with a special two-hour premiere on Thursday, Sept. 27th at 9/8c on NBC. It will return to its regular 10/9c time slot the following week.