I’ve never seen Oz, but there’s some cross-pollination with ER as well. The handsome actor who plays Stone’s assistant was on ERas the widowed father of a drug-abusing teenager. The woman who plays Nurse Hathaway on ER was on a L&O as a navy woman whose friend was killed by their superior officer.
I fidn it distracting too, but even actors/esses need to eat.
I have a friend here who is starting her career who’d desperately love to be on L&O. She’s good, and the reason she hasn’t gotten on yet is mainly because there ARE tons of talented actors looking for parts. Her acting coach was on the show several times (though once as a dead body, does that really count?)
The real reason for the repeats is a) because the producers kinda like it, they know it’s something that the fans like to spot
b) they like to reward good bit players with larger roles later, especially if they are looking for SAG credits. L&O is so popular because it offers some really great parts for SAG credit: you very often get small bit players having five lines or more in the course of the ep.
The best repeat was, of course, Lenny Briscoe swtiching from a career as a defense attorney to being a police detective. 
Lamia and apos: I think I’ll have to let you two fight it out over this one. Is there a shortage of available actors in NYC, or do the producers do it to (a) make the fans happy and (b) reward good bit players?
Anybody got any cites, or is this just personal opinions?
Barry
[Thanks for all the great responses so far, BTW!]
I read somewhere there’s a three year span between appearances on television shows.
I am probably wrong on that.
Here’s one…have there been any Trek actors on L&O, or vice versa?
Here’s what Jerry Orbach had to say about the casting process:
I think Lamia’s correct in stating that New York is more of a stage actor’s town, which limits the pool of actors available and appropriate for television. I also think Apos has a point in that there may then very well be a tight pool of talented actors for casting directors to choose from, creating tougher competition for a television spot. There’s no shortage of actors in New York; talented actors, however, are tougher to find.
I vaguely recall an article in the New York Times specifically about Law & Order and its draw on the local acting community; unfortunately I don’t have the time to look for it right now and I think it’s over a year old so it would be archived anyway. But I think there was the sense that Law & Order was a great boon to New York actors, offering them job opportunities and a chance for larger roles in their future careers. Shows like Sex and The City that film in New York have probably also impacted the local actors, even the Law & Order crew; Chris Noth plays Big, Dean Winters had a guest spot on SATC, and there’s surely some more I’m missing. Basically, as far as television goes, all roads lead to Law & Order.
Heck, if you’re talking [iTrek* actors, the non-Trek show that featured them the most was the cartoon Gargoyles.
Don’t forget B.D. Wong, Priest on OZ and Psychiatrist on Law and Order.
Can’t remember either of the characters’ names. DOH!
Hey! Courtney B. Vance, current DA on Criminal Intent. Did he not play a guy who killed his business partner in an earlier Law and Order episode?
Vance played a stockbroker who tried to use “Black Rage” as a justification for murder.
I found his soft-spoken delivery very chilling.
BD Wong also did the voiceover for the captain in Mulan.
I would not say that the practice is distracting in terms of establishing characters, but it does occasionally spoil some of the mystery in the first two acts. When you see a familiar face during the investigative process, you know that character will be a central player. It does not ruin the show, the fun of spotting the same actor in a new role balances it out (IMO).
On a complete tangent [hey, back off, man – it’s MY thread!], I was watching some made-for-TV murder mystery on Lifetime a few weeks back with my wife, and early on the cops had a brief run-in with the main suspect’s ex-wife, played by Sean Young. I decided to dazzle my wife with my deductive powers and predicted that the Sean Young character would end up being the real murderer at the end. “You see,” I told her, “everybody else in this movie is a complete nobody, but Sean Young is an established [well, more or less] actress. She’s too important to just have a brief throw-away role, so you can bet that she will end up to be the villain.”
Of course, the Sean Young character was killed off soon after that, so what the hell do I know?
Barry
I miss Paul Sorvino.
Well, since you hijacked your own thread…
A similar thing happened to me while viewing To Live and Die in L.A. with a group of friends. We were around 12 years old, watching the flick on video, I decided to display my precocious film sophistication. My friends were really getting into the action sequences. I explained that while they were cool, they were also pointless because any idiot knows the lead character in a movie cannot die. About five minutes later he was dead. This led to a couple weeks of “So how does this one end Spielberg?” Bastards.
It has been touched upon in this thread already, but the #1 reason why so many actors appear on both Law & Order and Oz are beacuse Dick Wolf and Tom Fontana are old friends. See this entry from IMDb for confirmation.
My wife and I play this game all the time - we’ll be watching an L&O episode and the first person to say which previous L&O episode that actor was in wins. I won the motherlode recently by IDing the guy that played “C Square” in a previous episode.
Another fun game is "Who is the most famous L&O guest star to appear before they were famous. We split on Laura Linney and Claire Danes.
I remember Linney (Blue Bamboo, right?), but when was Claire Daines on?
Of course, as a Madonna fan, I would notice this.
Carlos Leon, father of Madonna’s eldest child, made his second appearance on the show as a perp. In his first episode, he played the accomplice of a hit man (I think Santeria was involved somehow). Tonight, he played a man who killed his wife, who was originally married to his brother, but ran off with Carlos’ character. She was presumed dead and the brother was convicted of her murder.
I was hoping he wouldn’t be the baddie this time, but from what I’ve read in this thread, the trend is once a perp, always a perp.
Allison Janney did several “Law & Order” episodes, including Michael Moriarity’s last episode.
And now she actually gets fairly high billing in a summer film (albeit lower billing than the esteemed Mandy Moore.)
I think what’s rarer on L&O is a recurring guest star who gets to play the same role. Larry Miller is one of the few “repeat” offenders. He got off the first time, but was convicted the second time. And his character was really creepy.
Day time Soap Opera actors, the ones taped in NYC, make frequent appearances on L&O. I enjoy seeing them in different roles than the Daytime characters.
I’m a huge L&O fan. My personal favorite “recycling” was during the period when they were showing promos for the spin-off Special Victims Unit before it premiered. The scene where Chris Meloni gets out of a car, wearing a white kevlar vest and twirling handcuffs was from an episode of the original L&O where he played a bounty hunter and not actually a scene from the new show!
I remembered one!
L&O: The abortion episode NBC only showed once, where a pregnant woman bombed an abortion clinic and was killed in the blast. Ben Stone got the mastermind by asking her, “If abortion is murder no matter what, are you not guilty of the death of (the bomber’s) unborn child?”
ST:TNG: The same actress played a doctor in the episode where Worf was paralyzed. She had no qualms experimenting on patients to prove her medical theories.
Well, Amanda Peet is doing pretty well for herself (soon appearing in The Whole Ten Yards with Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry), and she appeared on L&O way back in 1995.