Paget Brewster Makes The Jump To ‘Law & Order: SVU’

Paget Brewster has the same job but on a new show.

The actress completed a six-year run on Criminal Minds and, this season, will remain in law enforcement but is instead joining the detectives of the Special Victims Unit on Law & Order: SVU.

As TVLine.com noted, the premiere of Law & Order on NBC just so happens to the airing at the same time Criminal Minds is playing on CBS.

Paget Brewster will be the guest star on the show’s two-hour “premiere event,” which airs Wednesday, September 26 from 9 pm to 11 pm. She plays the head of the District Attorney Office’s Public Integrity Unity and will be investigating the case against Captain Cragen (Dann Florek). In the Season 13 finale, it appeared that Cragen was set up for a murder.

In February, Paget Brewster announced that she would be leaving the role of Emily Prentiss that she played on Criminal Minds for the last six seasons.

As Law & Order: Special Victims Unit enters its 13th season, some critics have accused it of growing stale. Last season the NBC show Community devoted an entire episode to parodying the formulaic plot structure of the show, but Ryan McGee wrote for A.V. Club that the show has excelled in the niche it was created.

He wrote:

“And ‘execution’ is really the name of the game here, especially when character development (the nominal reason to watch even a quarter-length of this program) is the main draw for audiences to return week after week. The format of Law & Order turned into a slight parody of itself later on, before producing some of its finest seasons just before cancellation. But here, in its eighth season, everything’s running like a well-oiled machine. What might take another show 12 to 15 episodes to parse out here gets dealt with in a scant 45 minutes.”

Though it hasn’t been determined if Paget Brewster could have a recurring role on Law & Order, the show’s tendency to bring back actors from past seasons bodes well for her chances.