Around 2010, Dick Wolf’s vast television empire was suddenly coming undone.
First, NBC abruptly canceled his network mainstay, “Law & Order,” which had been on the air for two decades, a move that stunned Wolf’s small production company. A year later, two “Law & Order” spinoffs were unceremoniously shown the door. All that was left was “Law & Order: SVU,” a relatively slim slate for a company that prized multiple lines of revenue and that had made Wolf a very rich man. After all, Wolf has repeated a mantra for decades: “No show, no business.”
“It was a little tight there for a minute,” said Peter Jankowski, Wolf’s longtime No. 2.
The TV industry was migrating away from a decades-old staple that had made Wolf a dominant figure in prime-time viewing: the close-ended “procedural.” That popular genre of programming presented a conflict and a tidy resolution — generally in a courtroom, hospital or police precinct — all within an hour’s time (including commercials).
Instead, streaming outlets like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu were beginning to take flight, prestige TV (“It’s not TV, it’s HBO”) was ascendant, and complex, quirky, serialized programming was all the rage. Farewell, “CSI” and “Law & Order”; hello, “The Crown” and “Big Little Lies.”
Well, that was then.
In recent years, as Hollywood studios have slashed budgets and bid adieu to the Peak TV era, Wolf’s style of programming is coming back into vogue. The evidence is everywhere: Year after year, repeats of years-old network standbys like “Criminal Minds,” “NCIS” or “Grey’s Anatomy” populate Nielsen’s list of most-watched streaming shows, even as the studios spend tens of millions on grittier, more cinematic fare. Older series like “Suits,” “Prison Break” or “Young Sheldon” became unexpected hits over the last year when they began streaming on Netflix. Vulture recently declared, “Network TV Is Officially Back.”
Even Casey Bloys, the longtime head of HBO and Max, has programmed “The Pitt,” a network-style medical drama starring Noah Wyle from “ER” that debuts on Max on Thursday. One reason? These shows are not expensive to make, and there are plenty of episodes to keep viewers clicking “play” — key ingredients for this new era in television and streaming.
“You’re seeing a lot of people kind of rediscover what broadcast and basic cable had done so well, in terms of procedurals, cop shows, medical shows, things like that,” Bloys said late last year.
Now, some 15 years after his career low point, Wolf has rebuilt his television business — and then some. At 78, he has a staggering nine scripted shows running on several networks. NBC executives even brought “Law & Order” back to life more than a decade after the network canceled it. It is now in its 24th season.
Soon Wolf will have a 10th show, one that he believes has the potential to be a significant game changer and could position his company well into the future: his first streaming show, a series about a police force in Long Beach, California, titled “On Call,” which debuts on Amazon Prime Video on Thursday.
“I’ll tell you how important it is,” Wolf said in a recent interview. “It is the first project that I can truly say is Wolf Entertainment 2.0. I’m trying to position this company to be a player for the years to come.”
Although Wolf is finally entering streaming, the debut of “On Call” is really a moment that underscores how the streaming world and the television universe have gravitated back to him.
“Most really good writers can create one good show,” said Rick Rosen, Wolf’s agent at WME. “There’s a bunch that have done two. You can probably count on one hand those that have created five, let alone nine or 10. It’s unheard-of. As great as Aaron Spelling was or Steven Bochco was or David E. Kelley is, it’s a different type of thing that Dick does, and he does it better than anyone.”
And Wolf is not content on merely doling out a series or two to Amazon and Peacock (another spinoff, “Law & Order: Organized Crime,” will move from NBC to Peacock this year). He wants to build a new television universe and for his creations to be seen on several streamers.
And he wants the show to shake up the very format of dramas. Each episode of “On Call” is 30 minutes long, a throwback, he said, to a decades-old era when series like “Adam-12,” “The Naked City” and “Dragnet” were all half-hours, unlike the occasionally bloated episodes of streaming dramas that can be 80 minutes or more.
He thinks the format will thrive in an era of constant interruption. Wolf called the 30-minute running time a “comfort zone” for many viewers back in the 1950s and ’60s, and one that might be even more relevant today: “I’ve got a 14- and a 17-year-old. The attention span of them and their friends is startlingly brief.” He added, “I firmly believe that half-hours are very appealing.”
He envisions “On Call” as a prototype for more shows to come. They’ll start with the police. Then it’s on to the Long Beach paramedics. Then perhaps the Coast Guard. “Going into streaming, my hope is we are going to become the half-hour production company,” he said.
‘I Ain’t Going Away’
Wolf began mounting his comeback shortly after his fall.
When “Law & Order” and its two spinoffs were taken off the air, he recalled thinking: “This is really pissing me off. These are good shows.” And he had a message for the industry: “I ain’t going away.”
It was a faith his agent shared. “If you were great at one time, you have the potential to be great again,” Rosen said. “Dick created one of the great procedural dramas ever. His seminal show had been canceled, and I believed in him. He had an appetite to continue to create.”
Sure enough, in 2012, a year after “Law & Order: LA” and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” ended, Wolf debuted a new NBC series about a different type of emergency worker, and one in a new setting: “Chicago Fire.”
On the first day of shooting that show, Wolf told Jankowski that, with success, this would be merely the beginning.
“Chicago Fire” took off, and “Chicago P.D.” and “Chicago Med” would follow (all remain on the air, and have accumulated nearly 700 episodes combined). Within a few years, Wolf would have “FBI” and two spinoffs on the air at CBS (clocking in at nearly 300 episodes combined).
Even amid the rebuilding project, Wolf’s shows came off as old-fashioned to much of the industry. Those shows, after all, were made for broadcast networks, which were becoming the domain of baby boomers as younger viewers fled to streaming services.
And as streaming rose, the number of television shows produced in the United States exploded. Investments soared. Dramas could cost as much as $15 million an episode, significantly higher than the $3 million or $4 million networks used to pay. Shows like “The Morning Show,” from Apple TV+, were given $240 million series orders without executives so much as seeing a script.
Wolf, on the other hand, was not Mr. Prestige TV. His recent efforts never make critics’ year-end Top 10 lists.
When “Chicago P.D.” premiered in 2014, Vulture called it a “bad show,” saying the story lines were “the swept-up leftovers from the Dick Wolf Idea Factory.” (Nonetheless, NBC recently renewed it for a 12th season.) When “Chicago Med” premiered the next year, The New York Times described it as “so exactly what you expect it to be that there’s practically no point describing it, a bad thing if you like your shows innovative and unpredictable.” And when “FBI” debuted on CBS in 2018, another critic said it was like “every other crime procedural you’ve already seen.”
Wolf used to command more critical respect. A former advertising executive, he was once a writer and producer on celebrated series like “Hill Street Blues,” “Miami Vice” and “New York Undercover.” “Law & Order,” his creation, was nominated for best drama at the Emmys a whopping 11 years in a row, and took television’s most prestigious prize in 1997.
But as cultural tastes shifted, critics and the industry turned away. Wolf hasn’t been nominated at the Emmys for one of his scripted series since 2002.
Still, he stuck to his guns.
“He didn’t dilute it — he doubled down,” said Pearlena Igbokwe, chair of the Universal television studio group, which has a deal with Wolf’s company. (“Dick likes to say, ‘We don’t make Ferraris,” Rosen said. “‘We make S-class Mercedes that are beautifully built and run forever.’”)
But even as the shows induced eye rolls within some corners of the television industry, the raw ratings data told the Wolf enterprise something else.
“It did feel like people were like, ‘The fuddy-duddy procedural, everyone’s bored with that, nobody wants to watch this formulaic show,’” said Anastasia Puglisi, an executive at Wolf Entertainment. “But the audience never told us that.”
Still, year after year, the viewership totals were declining for anything on network or cable television. The company would need some sort of off-ramp if it wanted to be more than a reliable supplier of reruns.
It was time to enter streaming.
Like Father, Like Son
“On Call” is not just another Dick Wolf series. It also marks something of a generational shift, one that highlights the involvement of younger executives — including his 31-year-old son, Elliot — who Dick Wolf believes could eventually take over his company.
Elliot arrived at the company about six years ago. Then in his mid-20s, he kept his early efforts at the company relatively modest. He encouraged the company to drop its outdated name of Wolf Films and rename it Wolf Entertainment. He helped start a merchandise line (including T-shirts, hoodies and socks), built a social media presence and worked on podcast series for the company.
But the younger Wolf knew the company was a “little late to the streaming game” and wanted to find a way in.
He had an idea for a show in a new locale — Long Beach — and wanted to center it on two police officers. Elliot Wolf had discussions with Quibi, the short-lived short-form streaming service, before he was on the hunt for a steadier streaming partner.
At the time, Jennifer Salke was just a few years into her position as the head of Amazon’s studios. Salke had previously spent nearly a decade at NBC, and knew how addictive Wolf’s programming was for its audience.
“We had kind of been obsessed with like, ‘What’s our version of a Dick Wolf show?’” Salke said.
When Amazon started making original TV just over a decade ago, it tended to produce quirky critical favorites and award-winners (“Transparent,” “Mozart in the Jungle”). But under Salke’s purview, Amazon has gone with shows that are far broader, with hit series like “Reacher,” “Fallout” and “Cross.”
“I have a totally different perspective on ‘Yeah, this isn’t the cool thing right now, and it isn’t the thing that maybe is receiving all the awards,’ but the results are the results,” she said. “At our company, we are so customer-focused that even if someone’s skewering something with reviews, it’s only in the audience response — that’s what we care about.”
Negotiations between Elliot Wolf and Amazon executives began about a series with 30-minute episodes.
“There’s a few half-hour serialized streaming dramas, but the procedural doesn’t really exist, and everyone’s attention span is changing with social media and so forth,” Elliot Wolf said. “Let’s give people an easier access point with a half-hour format. They really dug that direction.”
When Elliot Wolf approached his father about a shorter run time, the elder Wolf thought back to all those dramas from the 1950s and ’60s. “I said yes — that’s a very viable idea,” Dick Wolf said.
Salke agreed. Amazon ordered “On Call.”
An Underdog Mentality
On a Friday afternoon before Christmas, Jankowski, Dick Wolf’s longtime lieutenant, was sitting in the no-frills “FBI” production offices in Brooklyn, New York. The furniture was low rent, and there were, unnervingly, rat-bait boxes stationed throughout their second-floor offices.
“We have sort of an underdog mentality that, if we ever lost it, we’d lose our edge,” Jankowski said.
A couple of blocks away, there were soundstages and offices for other Wolf productions like “FBI: Most Wanted,” a spinoff of “FBI,” and “Law & Order: Organized Crime,” another spinoff. Five blocks away was the set for the resurrected “Law & Order.” About 4 miles away, production for “SVU,” now in its 26th season, was up and running.
It was all a hive of activity — a sharp contrast to the state of the industry.
Ever since the so-called Netflix correction in April 2022 — when the streamer announced it had lost subscribers for the first time in a decade — investors abruptly soured on the spend-at-all-costs behavior that was then the industry norm. The number of TV shows produced rapidly plummeted. Then a pair of crippling writer and actor strikes in 2023 slowed production further.
The television industry remains in the throes of a contraction, and nearly every major streaming service now offers a lower-priced tier that includes commercials. Free streamers like Tubi and Roku are showing significant growth.
It’s against that backdrop that studio executives have started gravitating back to bread-and-butter TV series, including cop shows and comedies with a studio audience. The lessons of Peak TV have not been forgotten — cinematic series like “Shogun” will still exist, as will critical darlings like “The White Lotus,” which returns in February — but the industry is no longer turning up its nose at network-like fare. Maybe rooting for the heroes wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe audiences still wanted TV series that did not require consulting podcasts or online recaps to explain complex plotlines.
“On Call” centers on two beat cops. One is a fresh-faced rookie (Brandon Larracuente), the other a seen-it-all-before veteran (Troian Bellisario). “Keep that optimism as long as you can,” the veteran cop snorts at one point.
Elliot Wolf described the show as a “next-generation procedural.” Puglisi called it “same but different.”
Indeed, the series has — like all Wolf shows — plenty of close-ended plot lines, with a crime or two that need to be resolved before each episode ends. But there is something of a serialized element, too, something that Amazon “asked for” to keep people invested, Elliot Wolf said.
The show can be unusually violent for a Wolf series; at various points, a character is shot in the jugular and bleeds out on a street; a perpetrator takes a flying leap off the roof of a parking garage; and another person goes up in flames at a gas station. The show’s graphic nature would not pass muster at NBC.
“On Call” features recurring roles for network TV veterans of yore, including Eriq La Salle, who played Dr. Benton in “ER” and is an executive producer of the show, as well as Lori Loughlin (“Full House”).
Dick Wolf’s interest in the show was relentless, producers said, giving Elliot Wolf and Tim Walsh, its showrunner, notes after every draft. “We would turn in a script and he was like: ‘It’s a good script, but it’s not propulsive. I don’t want to take the foot off the gas on this thing,’” Elliot Wolf recalled.
The show was also much cheaper to make than Wolf Entertainment’s hourlong network dramas, something that delighted Amazon executives, and something the Wolf camp is aware is vital to a new television era.
“On Call” runs for only eight episodes, a normal season length for a streaming series, but a departure from what Wolf Entertainment is accustomed to on network television, where seasons can include 20 episodes.
But if “On Call” takes off, the shorter episode orders may be temporary.
“It’s not going to be some sort of modest, constipated version of an order of a limited series or something,” Salke of Amazon said. “The ambition is to deliver many hours of the show.”
A ‘Game Plan’
Like Aaron Spelling or Norman Lear or any other eminent TV producer before him, Dick Wolf has no retirement plans.
“I don’t have any encumbering reasons to do that,” he said. “I’m single. I’m going to be 78 next week or something. Pretty great life.”
He is, however, thinking about succession.
Wolf said the company would most likely belong to Jankowski, his longtime right-hand man; Puglisi, the 33-year-old executive; Rebecca McGill, another executive; and Elliot, his son.
“That’s the game plan here,” Wolf said. “Elliot’s got the name. I’m expecting him to be around for his working life, and not messing it up.” (Wolf used a vulgarity stronger than “messing.”)
To pull it off, “On Call” is going to have to become a hit — or at least a franchise in a similar vein to the “Chicago,” “Law & Order” and “FBI” universes.
“What does the future hold?” Wolf said. “It’s hubris to say it. But I just want the party to continue.”
c.2025 The New York Times Company. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
