Law & Order

First things first. Before anything else, Wolf will have to keep Special Victims Unit from becoming a special victim itself--which may not be so easy given where NBC has plunked it on the schedule. Not only is SVU saddled with an unfortunate 9 p.m. slot (cramping the sex crime drama's racy 10 p.m.-style story lines), but it also faces fierce competition from Fox's Ally McBeal (which traditionally draws a large female audience) and ABC's Monday Night Football (which traditionally draws the entire male audience). So far, the numbers have been promising but inconclusive--around 13 million viewers a week--but there's no question about one thing: Wolf won't have 10 years to make the show a hit.

That's a fact of life that hangs over the Special Victims Unit set like an ominous, unsettling mist (then again, SVU's soundstage is in New Jersey, so maybe there's another explanation for that purplish cloudlike thing in the sky). Everyone involved in the show is keenly aware that after only a month on air, some tweaks are inevitable. "Which episodes did you see?" asks Mariska Hargitay, the actress who plays Olivia Benson, the chip-on-her-Calvin Klein-shoulder-pad detective who, along with Christopher Meloni's Det. Elliot Stabler, toils for SVU's sex crime squad. "Because the first one is kind of weird. I come off like a real hothead in that episode. It gets better."

The show has already proved clever enough to reserve a squad room desk for Richard Belzer's Det. John Munch, the deliciously deadpan conspiracy wacko who helped make the late great Homicide: Life on the Street one of NBC's finest hours--but here's what changes to expect. For starters, although SVU was never intended to be split into 30-minute segments for syndication, it's going to be restructured more along the original Law & Order model, with cops in the first part and courtroom scenes in the second (a special sex crimes prosecutor, still uncast, is being written into future scripts). Also, expect a rollback in the personal department.

"Dick originally said he wanted 20 percent personal stuff, 80 percent legal," says SVU's head writer, Robert Palm, with a tinge of nervousness in his chuckle. "Now he's talking about bringing it down to about 7 percent."

Take away another six percent and it'll almost be like L&O. Minus one critical element: It still won't have Steven Hill, the ex-Actors Studio star who, as the charmingly crusty DA Adam Schiff (L&O's only irreplaceable character), has single-handedly raised the craft of eating a sandwich to heights even his old acting teacher Lee Strasberg couldn't have imagined.

Hill, of course, is also the one who closes most of the episodes with a snappily delivered, sublimely crabby ironic crack. Like this one: "Nobody eats on TV like I do," he says, nibbling a lemon tart, theatrically spewing crumbs all over his dressing room. "That's the reason the show's been so successful. They've all tried to copy me. But they can't. They don't know my secret." He takes another crumbly bite. "And they never will."

Cha-chung.