NEW YORK, April 30 (UPI) -- Danielle Mone Truitt says there is one huge advantage to Law & Order: Organized Crime's Season 5 move from NBC to Peacock: the cast is now allowed to use a more profanity.
"It's Peacock. Hey, we're not going to make it deep. It wasn't deep at all. I could not wait to curse," Truitt, 44, told UPI with a laugh in a recent Zoom interview.
"We were all excited from that. Do you know how many times over these last few seasons you want to curse so much? And we can't. And now we're like, 'Yes, this is great!'' she said. "The storylines are more gritty. The way it is shot is more gritty, more edgy. The content and what we're talking about, the cases we're exploring, there's a little more violence. There's just more that you can show on a streaming platform."
Airing Thursday nights, the procedural follows Truitt's Sergeant Ayanna Bell, the squad supervisor for a New York Police Department task force that brings down gangsters and human traffickers.
Season 5 kicked off with Bell asking her second-in-command, seasoned investigator Elliot Stabler (Chris Meloni), to go undercover as a commercial truck driver with a checkered past to catch the leaders of a prostitution ring with ties to serial killings across the United States.
Meanwhile, Stabler's brother Randall (Dean Norris) is watching out for their mother Bernie (Ellen Burtsyn), who has dementia, and Stabler's son Eli (Nicky Torchia), who is an NYPD rookie expecting his first child with his girlfriend Becky (Kiaya Scott).
"Bell was never asking Stabler to go undercover. He's always telling her that he wants to and she's always trying to talk him out of it. So, this time, you get to see her say, 'Hey, we need you," Truitt said.
"I feel like Stabler is Belle's big brother, but Bell is the more responsible one, the younger sister that kind of has her [expletive] together a little bit more and Stabler is like the older brother who just kind of does what he feels and is very reactive."
Bell is always there for Stabler when Stabler needs her and that is on quite a few occasions during these upcoming, action-packed episodes.
"He goes through a lot in this season," Truitt said.
"There's loss. There's [expletive] blowing up and everything. So, he has a lot of stuff. He's dealing with his brother, family dynamics, his son becoming an officer, which is the weirdest thing for all of us. Like: 'What? Why are you following in his footsteps?'"
The actress said Bell is concerned watching the younger cops come up through the ranks because she knows what a personal toll this job can take on them.
"When you've been at it for a while, you have to give up a lot. She lost her marriage," Truitt said of Bell.
"It makes her check in with [the younger cops] just to make sure that they're mentally in the right place. I think she trusts that her team is experienced and knows what they're doing," she added.
"It is a sacrifice. Your whole life becomes dedicated to this kind of work. You don't get to just go home and it doesn't come home with you. I think Bell has probably created a regimen for herself or some kind of self-care, something where she can leave what is happening at work over there and then able to be home and be present for her child."
