Elliot Stabler to return for next season's Law & Order: SVU premiere

TVLine

“It’s pretty clear that Elliot will be in the SVU season opener. I think that much I know," SVU showrunner Warren Leight said on the show's podcast. Leight's comments come after he said that Stabler's wife and son were supposed to appear in this season's scrapped finale. Whether they will end up appearing in the premiere is unknown. Leight also offered a few details on the Elliott Stabler SVU spinoff. “We had heard distant thunder about Chris Meloni coming back in the fall and we were going to lay a little groundwork for that," said Leight. "We were going to see Kathy Stabler come back very upset. Her son had been rolled by a team of ne’er-do-wells and may have been drugged, and we were going to revisit Simon’s seeming overdose and we were going to get to know the stresses on the Stabler—what had happened to the Stabler family after Elliot both left SVU and apparently left them. We were just going to lay some groundwork down in anticipation of Elliot’s return of course in his own series. We had the sense that the first episode of next year for SVU was going to bring Elliot back, so we were going to foreshadow that and explain a little more what happened to Simon."