"Law & Order" D.O.A.?

Has NBC brought the gavel down on the original-formula Law & Order after 20 seasons of telling the stories of the police who investigate crimes and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders? Nikki Finke’s site is saying yes! This is terrible if it’s true — not because of the dumb “longest-running show ever” record that Dick Wolf was trying to set (if the cancellation goes through it’ll have tied Gunsmoke in longevity) but because the show was just starting to get really good again in both quality of acting and tightness of storylines after a bunch of seasons suffering through the morass of bad plotlines and even worse acting that characterized The Röhm/Thompson/Farina Dark Period, which still dominates the reruns on TNT to this day. And to add insult to injury, the show’s Los Angeles-based spinoff is still set to premiere this fall as planned.