David Graziano, co-creator and executive producer of Coyote, will serve as showrunner for Law & Order: SVU’s forthcoming 24th season, according to Deadline.
He will replace longtime SVU head Warren Leight, who revealed in May that he will step down as the procedural’s showrunner at the conclusion of Season 23. “As some of you have already figured out, I will be leaving at the conclusion of #SVU23,” he tweeted at the time. I’ve chosen to take a sabbatical since the last two years of running a program during a pandemic have been exhausting.
Leight served as SVU’s showrunner from Seasons 13 to 17. His reappearance occurred in Season 21.
Mariska Hargitay, who has been on SVU since its inception and is also an executive producer, hailed him in a series of tweets for his “heart and soul.” “You provided us with this every day. Thank you for your subtlety, sensitivity, depth of knowledge, and great workmanship… What you have accomplished and crammed into the bandwidth of your wonderful intellect over the course of these years is nothing short of heroic.”
Graziano’s television work includes Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, What/If, American Gods, Terra Nova, Lie to Me, Southland, and Las Vegas, in addition to CBS All Access’ Coyote.
Graziano succeeds Warren Leight, who stepped down as showrunner at the conclusion of the current 23rd season following a combined eight-year tenure.
Law & Order: SVU, which stars Mariska Hargitay, Ice T, Kelli Giddish, Peter Scanavino, and Octavio Pisano, is the longest-running live-action primetime series on television.
The series is executive produced by Dick Wolf, Graziano, Julie Martin, Hargitay, Norberto Barba, Ken Brown, Arthur Forney, and Peter Jankowski in cooperation with Universal Television, a branch of Universal Studio Group, and Wolf Entertainment.
Next season, two of the three Law & Order programs will have new showrunners; SVU co-executive producer Bryan Goluboff has been tapped to lead Law & Order: Organized Crime.
1998 marked the beginning of Graziano’s television writing career, when his play “Acorn” was created and performed at the Humana Festival in Louisville, Kentucky. After being interviewed on NPR, J.J. Abrams requested him to contribute to Felicity.
Since then, Graziano has worked as a co-executive producer or executive producer on other programs, including In Plain Sight, Lie to Me, Southland, American Gods, and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. Recently, he co-created, executive produced, and served as showrunner for the CBS All Access drama series Coyote, starring Michael Chiklis and directed by Michelle MacLaren. His project Salvage is in development at Sony Pictures TV with Cobra Kai founders’ Counterbalance Entertainment, in addition to an untitled 1970s-era New York-set police drama he’s working on with SK Global. Graziano is represented by the agency UTA.
