Warning: spoilers are ahead for the series premiere of Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent on The CW, called “The Key to the Castle.”
NBC isn’t the only home to Law & Order action this fall in the 2025 TV schedule, although the original series, Law & Order: SVU, and Law & Order: Organized Crime won’t be back in primetime until September 25. The CW premiered the newest show in the franchise a day earlier on September 24 with Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent. The Canada-set series seemed pretty distinct from the NYC-based shows from the jump, but I’d held out hope for an Easter egg or two tied to SVU… up until I watched the pilot and found that this is a solid Law & Order show without any shout outs to Mariska Hargitay.
Starring Kathleen Munroe, who had already appeared in no fewer than five other Wolf Entertainment TV shows, as Detective Sergeant Frankie Bateman opposite Aden Young as Detective Sergeant Henry Graff, Law & Order Toronto actually feels right at home in the franchise on its own. I really only noticed the different setting when the detectives were investigating a body found in Lake Ontario rather than NYC’s Hudson River or East River, when Young spoke in a very Canadian accent, and when the characters were talking about “university” rather than college. (Fortunately, Toronto in the Dick Wolf TV universe doesn’t seem to have its own version of Hudson University.)
The case was pretty standard, starting with the murder of a businessman mixed up in cryptocurrency, and expanding to include infidelity, a traitorous best friend, a secret pregnancy, and a bad guy who didn’t seem to feel all that bad about committing murder. There were none of the kinds of crimes that SVU’s opening narration describes as “sexually-based offenses [that] are considered especially heinous,” and even the death wasn’t quite as grisly as viewers might see on Law & Order. (And definitely not as grisly as what fans have seen on Christopher Meloni’s Organized Crime!)
The premiere was fine, even if not the most spectacular hour of television that I’ve ever seen, and I now think that it was much better to start the show without any nods to SVU than to try and tie back to the NBC world. Toronto can stand on its own to tell stories. Plus, Kathleen Munroe actually played a different character on Law & Order: Organized Crime as recently as 2023, which was then just a couple of years after Munroe’s character was killed off of CBS’ FBI.
As a perk for anybody who is interested in continuing to watch Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent, the September 24 premiere on The CW was only the drama’s American debut. The full first season already aired back in 2024 on Citytv in Canada, while Season 2 aired on Citytv earlier this year. It was also renewed for Season 3, which is expected to air on Citytv in 2026. Whether or not the Canadian series takes off on The CW in the U.S., the drama has a fairly long future ahead of it already in the Great White North.