‘Law & Order: Organized Crime’: Danielle Moné Truitt Teases Bell’s Frenemy & Team’s Grief in Season 4

We didn’t need any more reasons to love Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), the boss on Law & Order: Organized Crime, but it sounds like Season 4 is going to give us one: a healthy way of managing her grief.

Season 3 ended with the Organized Crime Control Bureau losing one of its own, Detective Jamie Whelan (Brent Antonello) in the course of a crossover investigation with SVU, and while a few months have passed since then in-show, everyone is still coping, some in better ways than others. And on Bell’s plate in the Season 4 premiere, “Memory Lane,” airing January 18, besides her own grief? Stabler (Christopher Meloni) returns from a dangerous undercover assignment and has to deal with rapid changes at work. One of those is the advisor Bell hires to bring in AI technology that could revolutionize police investigation.

Here, Truitt previews where Season 4 finds Bell’s team.

Last season ended on a sad note. How has Bell been dealing with the loss of Jamie?

Danielle Moné Truitt: Bell has been seeing a therapist. After losing Gina [Charlotte Sullivan], after losing Morales [Michael Rivera], after going through a divorce, there’s just been so many things back-to-back for her, and so she is seeing a therapist and I think that’s helping her a lot be able to navigate this and to be able to help the team with their grief. So when you see her, you basically see her doing what she does best, which is helping everybody else get it together. She talks to Stabler about where he’s at. He decided to go undercover, which is definitely a defense mechanism and just not wanting to deal with what happened. Now he’s back and it’s like, well, you’re going to have to deal with what happened now. And also updating him on how Reyes [Rick Gonzalez] and Jet [Ainsley Seiger] are doing because when he decided to take the undercover job, he wasn’t able to be there for them either. Reyes is just very angry. He is mad about everything. Nothing sits well with him.

So Bell’s kind of been having to shoulder people’s emotions and how they’re dealing with stuff on her own. And of course she’s doing the best she can to do it, but she has to have these conversations with the team as time goes on to check in with them and honestly let them know, the way you’ve been handling this loss is not going to be good for you or the team moving forward, so you’re going to have to get some help. So I think that’s her main focus is making sure the team has some help.

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Plus, Bell’s bringing in a new person to the team that works with AI and is her way of coping because everybody has a different way of coping. So even though she’s in therapy, she’s still coping as well. And I think one of her coping mechanisms is to fix it. It’s not maybe to go get drunk and have sex with random people. That’s not her thing. Her thing is to zero in on it and try to fix it so that it doesn’t happen again. The truth of it is with policing, with life, with anything, sometimes it’s not on you to fix. And I think that’s probably a lesson for Bell to learn, that she can’t fix everything, but she’s bringing the AI guy in to help with a different way of policing that could have possibly saved Jamie if we would’ve been doing it that way. And I think that’s her way of trying to make things right with what happened.

What are the cons of that new AI program? Because Bell’s also bringing in a new person when the team is going through a lot.

Yeah, that is the con, that we’re going through so much and that Stabler and Reyes are not open to what this is. For Stabler, it’s an age thing. He’s like, what do you mean, a computer can do my job better than me? Nobody wants to be told that, you know what I mean? And I think it threatens his idea of policing. And then for Reyes, I think it’s just too soon for him to have another person in our space while we’re still trying to deal with Jamie’s loss. It wouldn’t matter who it was. The AI thing, I think, is inconsequential for him. He doesn’t want anybody new around. So it’s a little difficult. She’s trying to manage emotions and manage people’s attitudes and then do her actual job at the same time.

Speaking of managing emotions, Stabler’s brothers (Dean Norris plays one) are coming. What can you preview about that? Because having them around must distract Stabler and therefore Bell has to deal with that.

Actually, I don’t know. These first few episodes, they’re just being introduced like, “Oh, Stabler went to the airport to pick up his brother,” and Bell’s like, “What? He has a brother?” And Jet’s like, “I know, this is weird.” So we’ll see as the episodes go on, if the worlds collide, if his brothers collide with his work life. I hope it does. I hope we get to play with them as well. I’m sure Bell will end up having some kind of conversation with Stabler about the fact that he has brothers. Hopefully it’ll come up and they’ll be able to have that discussion and see what he’s feeling about it.

And see Bell interact with the entire Stabler family with the brothers coming in.

Invite me to dinner!

Has Bell’s dynamic with anyone from the team changed in a major way? It sounds like she’s still doing what she’s been doing.

No, it hasn’t changed in a major way. She’s still Bell trying to keep the team together, trying to make things go as smoothly as possible and stay true to why she took on this job in the first place. She’s still doing Bell things.

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Does she have anything going on outside of work this season? I feel like if anyone needs a good work-life balance, it’s her.

It is! And I don’t know! I hope so. With our new showrunner [John Shiban], I’m looking forward to what else they write for the rest of this season. But so far Bell does not have a personal life, so I’m hoping she’ll get one.

Also just something to relax and not have to be the boss of everyone.

I know. I know. I’m looking forward to that.

Is there anything else that’s Bell’s main focus at the beginning of the season besides what we’ve talked about?

Other than the team, it’s just navigating the bureaucracy of the department. There’s a captain who she worked with years and years ago who was a frenemy of some sort, and so they end up having to work together on something. You get to see Bell navigate that weird relationship. I’m sure all the fans are going to be annoyed that this person is messing with Bell, so that’ll be fun to see.

What else can you preview about that?

She’s the captain of the Hate Crimes division, and back in the day, they came up in the academy together. They got in a full on fight in the academy, and so they’ve always kind of bumped heads. A situation comes up where Hate Crimes is involved and she’s a captain, so she uses her rank to put Bell in her place, but then Bell gets a chance — ain’t anybody going to put Bell in her place, okay?

We’ve met detectives from Hate Crimes on SVU. Are we going to see any of them?

No, I don’t think so. This is a new character, but it’s definitely a fun dynamic.

What can you preview about the cases that will keeping the team busy?

There’s a fentanyl case where there’s this big drug organization that’s bringing fentanyl into the United States. Stabler had been undercover already working on it, so he brings it to the team and now the team has to assist him. Then while we’re still dealing with that, there’s this hate crime that happens in the Muslim community, and so we’re dealing with that. But I feel like there’s maybe some kind of connection between the two.

Law & Order: Organized Crime, Season 4 Premiere, Thursday, January 18, 10/9c, NBC