NBC television's series Law & Order is now well into its ninth season in an era when few shows make it through their first, especially hour-long dramatic shows. In addition to surviving, which shows it has been developing an audience of sufficient size to be renewed, Law & Order has garnered many awards, from the prestigious Emmy in various categories to other television and related awards. It has accomplished this under circumstances which might have destroyed a different sort of show, for virtually the entire cast has been replaced since the first season, with only one cast member continuing through the entire run (and he was not in the pilot and so is missing from that one episode). The show is certainly an ensemble show, which is what allows it to survive cast changes, though changes of this magnitude are rare in a continuing series.
The show is high quality, well-written and well-acted, yet its success has also been in part the result of a series of unforeseen circumstances. The producer of the show is Dick Wolf. He notes that what has become the longest-running dramatic hour-long show currently on television started with a different format and with no certainty of success. He further notes that it may be the only series ever sold to three networks before it got on the air. It was originally sold to the Fox Television Network, but Fox had no faith in it and backed away. The pilot was made for CBS, but CBS did not believe the show would work. Wolf took the pilot to NBC, where then-president Brandon Tartikoff expressed a liking for the premise but uncertainty whether it could be done every week. Tartikoff therefore asked to see six scripts, and based on that, he ordered thirteen episodes. Wolf says that the network sales department hated the show the first year and that the show was proving to be a financial disaster, without enough advertising to pay for production. Wolf says, Then people started to recognize tha...