‘Law & Order: SVU’ Hit 600 Episodes With a Case Older Than the Show

Christopher Meloni's Stabler came back to reopen a 1998 murder, and only The Simpsons and Gunsmoke ever logged more episodes.

In the 600th episode of “Law & Order: SVU,” Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler reopened a murder from 1998, a year before the show itself existed.

Christopher Meloni came back as Stabler for the hour, titled “Obedience,” which NBC lists as the sixth episode of season 28. It aired Thursday, Nov. 12. The Hollywood Reporter noted that only two scripted primetime series had reached 600 before: “The Simpsons” and “Gunsmoke.” Showrunner Michele Fazekas, who wrote the episode, told the Reporter she was after “an old school Benson and Stabler episode.”

The case, as the Reporter described it, starts with jury consultant Gwen Sharpe (J. Smith-Cameron) pressing Benson (Mariska Hargitay) to take a second look at the 1998 killing of a young nun who was also raped. Gwen thinks the man serving time for it is innocent. The trail leads to a retired priest who once said Mass at the victim’s convent, along with leads Stabler never ran down.

It also turns out Stabler kept Benson, then the new detective in the squad, out of the interrogation. When he asks why she’s so set on digging it all up again, she shoots back, “Why aren’t you?”

Going back before the beginning solved a practical problem first. Stabler doesn’t work in SVU anymore, so Fazekas told the Reporter she needed something big enough to bring him back, and an old case felt natural. She knows that era firsthand: she wrote for the show in seasons 3 through 7, during the original partnership.

The shape came before the plot. Fazekas told TVLine that once Meloni turned out to be available, which she said wasn’t a sure thing, her next idea was to put the two of them in a car on long drives and in a motel, before she even had a case. In the story, they hadn’t talked in 18 months. It ends with Stabler asking Benson to come to Arizona, and Fazekas said he knew she’d say no.

Fans hoping for a sequel this season shouldn’t wait up. Asked by TVLine whether Meloni would return in season 28, Fazekas said no: “We’ve told that story.”

The milestone itself got a cake on set and a dinner once filming wrapped, then everyone went back to work, the Reporter reported. “That’s just doing television,” Fazekas told the Reporter. She said the staff always has about five episodes going at once, some in prep, some being written, some in post. By the time 600 aired, the crew was shooting episode 10 and prepping 11.

That steady rhythm is how a show gets this far, and almost nobody has. In a 2016 tally, CBS News counted fewer than 15 primetime scripted series that had ever passed 300 episodes. SVU was at 383 then. The original “Law & Order,” the show SVU spun off from, finished its 1990-2010 run at 456. “Lassie” reached 591, but only by counting two seasons that aired in syndication.

“Gunsmoke” ran 635 episodes on CBS between 1955 and 1975, CBS News counted. Nobody topped it until “The Simpsons” aired its 636th in April 2018, according to a Looper article republished by AOL.

The Reporter says SVU’s season has 21 episodes, so the 15 still to come would carry it to 615. That’s 20 short. The show that just went digging into its own past is now chasing a western that left the air in 1975.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter, retrieved November 13, 2026. Other sources: nbc.com, tvline.com, CBS News, aol.com.