Time was that replacing actors on the Law and Order mothership was like rearranging snow on an iceberg: it'd keep moving just fine, thank you very much. But is that still true today, with the show not anchoring the NBC lineup the way it used to? Guess we'll see, since Jesse L. Martin -- who we've always imagined literally leaping straight from his singing-and-dancing role in Broadway's Rent to playing L&O's Detective Ed Green in 1999 -- will be leaving the show at the end of the current season. Wasn't he supposed to play Marvin Gaye in a biopic or something? Well, maybe that's why he's out.
Martin is rumored to be replaced by Anthony Anderson, who we never saw on The Shield -- we're not that far in our Netflix queue yet -- but was decidedly better than his material on Fox's most-likely-canned-but-in-limbo K-Ville, which we watched because, well, the Missus wanted to support her hometown. Like we say, Anderson was great -- but that show didn't make us think about post-Katrina New Orleans so much as think about how much we miss Fastlane. And that ain't no kind of good.