NBC renews all six Dick Wolf shows, bringing the super-producer to over 84 seasons on the network
Three Law & Order shows and the three Chicago shows will all be coming back next year
Aux News Dick Wolf
By this time next year, give or take a few months maybe, Dick Wolf will have put his name on more than 84 seasons of television on NBC. That’s more seasons than the man has been alive for! Hell, TV itself has only been around for a few more seasons than that!
Of course, Dick Wolf is not a time traveler, so he has accomplished this by producing a veritable crap-load of TV shows all at the same time, and that’s not going to stop any time soon: According to The Hollywood Reporter, NBC has renewed all six of his currently running shows—that’s Law & Order: SVU, the rebooted regular Law & Order, spin-off Law & Order: Organized Crime, windy firefighter show Chicago Fire, windy cop show Chicago PD, and windy doctor show Chicago Med—for new seasons. This will be season 25 for SVU and 23 for regular Law & Order (which was off the air for a little more than a decade and will likely hit 500 episodes with this renewal).
And lest you think those Chicago shows are newcomers to the Dick Wolf scene, this will be season 12 for Fire, 11 for PD, and nine for Med. Add all of that to Organized Crime’s four seasons and you have 84 seasons of television… but Wolf has been creating NBC shows for a long-ass time, and those 84 seasons don’t even include things that are no longer on the air. There’s also Nasty Boys and Mann & Machine and Law & Order: Trial By Jury and Law & Order: LA and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. By our count, that puts him at least a little over 100 on NBC alone, so it’s no wonder that the network just keeps throwing time slots at him.
Imagine being the person in charge of filling out a TV network’s schedule, and one man has been semi-responsible for giving you something to put on TV over 100 times. Sometimes they’re Law & Order and sometimes they’re whatever the hell Nasty Boys was, but at least they’re all something. That’s a man you want in your corner.
37 Comments
People forget that JAG(which seems to have been at least semi-forgotten in and of itself, judging by the fact that the franchise it started is called the NCIS franchise) was on NBC its first year before moving to CBS. Bet they wish they hadn’t let that one get away.
I’m happy about this. I’ve been really enjoying the revived classic Law and Order. It fills my niche for this kind of action.Great cast too.
I liked Mehcad Brooks from Supergirl, but they never knew what to do with him. He’s been great in this.
Did it get better in the second season? I watched the first because the cast was full of actors that I liked in other shows but found it pretty disappointing overall.
I caught an episode a few weeks ago. It was very paint by numbers filled with every cliche we’ve gotten used to from the series. It was like watching a parody of the series without any jokes.
I’d say so but then again I really like the format.My personal favourite period of the original show is probably seasons 5-8 – the early McCoy era, late-period Logan/Benjamin Bratt plus Kincaid and Ross. And lots of Lenny. It’s great stuff.There’s plenty of dud episodes in there but there’s good stuff in more or less every era.The very early years are absolutely wild to rewatch now given the blatant and open (though accurate for the profession and the era) homophobia and frequently horrifying statements about domestic violence. SVU is the same – their treatment of certain topics, plus frequent transphobia makes some of that early period quite spicy by today’s standards.
I love watching the really old L&O episodes because it gives you a picture into how crime fighting was pre-tech revolution. Like in the early seasons, they are constantly standing by pay-phones to call into the station and stuff. Over time just more and more “new” stuff is added in.
Oh absolutely. Computers arrive to a degree in the mid-90s with Rey Curtis, his laptop and the beginning of the show’s hilariously weird relationship with the internet.It’s chronic obsessions with chat rooms and other stuff through that period which it gets wrong so frequently that it is hilarious.
The Briscoe years are definitely the peak of the show. Lenny had a way of delivering the dumb one-liners to describe the murder in a way that was kind of funny but also sad that no one else has really captured. And Jack McCoy was way more entertaining as an ADA than the DA (and better than his two replacements at ADA since) – the way his eyebrows would react to surprises at trial was always entertaining.
I think Hugh Dancy is pretty awful with his overwrought facial expressions, and I would be happier if they toned down the makeup on Odelya Halevi (his assistant) to “professional woman” from “full face of professional catwalk makeup”. She’s a prosecutor working on a government salary, not a supermodel in Paris.
I like the cop side of the show fairly well. It took them a little while to find Jeffrey Donovan’s character, but I think they got it now. At first he seemed kind of truculent and dumb, but now he makes more sense.The Chicago shows on the other hand…I hate the cop one, and as far as I am concerned the other two are fruit of the poison tree.
“She’s a prosecutor working on a government salary, not a supermodel in Paris.”They’ve really struggled sometimes with the female ADAs. I think they probably did Ross the best, but it helped that she had a super rich ex-husband and came from a corporate career so it made sense that she had more money. They dressed Kincaid like an old lady. Rubirosa…where do I begin. I didn’t like her character anyway, but they dressed her like a weird schoolmarm lawyer? They always had her in these cardigan blazers for court, and NO LAWYER EVER would appear in court in anything less than a full suit, never a cardigan with a belt around it. Especially a female lawyers as a lot of judges have a hard time respecting us anyway. I think they did the sweaters as a way to maybe tone own her beauty or something? I don’t know what they were trying to do but it annoyed the heck out of me.
It is exactly like OG Law and Order has always been:Cold open with a murder usually, detectives come, witty one-liner. Crime that is somewhat reminiscent of a “recent” event or multiple recent events mixed togetherCops then investigate through the twists and turns until an arrest is madeProsecutors talk to the DA and each other, go to trial, curveball, verdict/pleaCreditsAnd I LOVE IT. Each show has it’s own formula but nothing beats the OG. Though Organized Crime is pretty good, basically a serialized show based entirely around Det. Stabler.
Yes, this. The new characters appeared like robots playing stereotypes. It was awful. Hopefully it’s improved.
The quality has been very spotty lately—-as somebody else noted above, they really have been phoning it in on plots in Season “2″. Jeffrey Donovan’s acting is still generally awful, and as much as I love Jack/Sam, he looks and sounds like a walking corpse.But, I guess its still better than nothing.
I had such high hopes (I absolutely love original flavor) but have been having a hard time with it, especially because I just watched the great season 5-10 stretch on DVD. In particular,1) every scene seems to be overlaid with dramatic music, which feels cheap
2) the detectives and witnesses are so SERIOUS in every conversation and interview. They’ve totally abandoned the “just another day at the office” feel of the original run
3) they are constantly recapping the facts of the case. In the old days, if you looked down at your phone, you’d miss stuff, and you might not know exactly what’s going on, but it was fine because you could still know where you were within the episodic formula. Now, they hold your hand so that you can’t get lost even if you want to.
4) the law part has been dumbed down significantly. In seasons 1-3ish, they used to argue specific case law, which I didn’t understand as a viewer (and it was fine! I liked House but don’t know how lupus works.) They seemed to titrate that out, but they still had interesting legal maneuvering and they would at least mention specific cases or precedents. There is none of that left. I gave up when the significant legal conflict of a recent episode was that a cop didn’t want to testify because he was ashamed he hadn’t gone into a nightclub to confront a shooter…who cares? McCoy circa ‘98 would have gotten him to testify by threatening to leak it to the press. The defense attorney’s whole strategy was to call they guy a coward…how on earth is that an effective defense for your client? The lawyers literally sit around the office now and ask questions like “How can we show that John Doe really was the shooter?”
Sorry for ranting. I’m just very “look how they massacred my boy” about it all.
Has it gotten better? I loved the old one, and I watched the first couple of episodes of the new one and thought it was extremely dire. I haven’t watched since.
Could do a friends/frasier/seinfeld type show in chicago maybe?You know, NOT a running hit piece on the city?
Fuck you, AVClub.
Cast of American Auto: “Does he produce our show as well?”
The Dick Wolf Howls
I wasn’t surprised to learn that in his early days, Dick Wolf collaborated with Dong Johnson. (They were both on Miami Vice.)
I like the idea of Dong Johnson, the star of a Miami Vice porn parody.
Featuring Reb Brown as Big McLargeHuge! (Not to be confused with the time he was actually on the show…)
“You tellin’ me there are people out there who enjoy watching procedural TV shows about cops, prosecutors, fire-fighters and hospital staff?”
There’s an endless supply of possible spinoffs.Albany PDLaw and Order: BillingsFBI: Break Room
Yeah, you got it, Ice.
That ought to keep the Dickwolves from the door.
Inside you, there are two Dickwolves
Dick Wolf has his finger on the pulse of mediocre television viewers. An empire of dreck.
Good, I love me some Law & Order and was especially happy when the original show came back. Each one has it’s own take on that universe; OG has the tried and true formula. SVU is more focused on the cops/victims and less on the trial parts and Organized Crime is basically a serialized show that only exists because the L&O universe has been around for so long and they could build a serialized show around Det. Stabler.The Chicago shows are meh. Really enjoyed fire mostly, never got to much into PD or Med.
I was so disappointed when they cancelled the old one. I was really getting into that new cast, even though they tried a little too hard with the “ripped from the headlines” angle and many of the stories were unnecessarily convoluted. I sure do love Jeremy Sisto, though. The whole cast, except for Connie, really. She sucked.
I think you need to count the FBI shows as well.
Wolf also produces 3 different FBI shows for CBS and between those, the Chicago shows and L&O it doesn’t seem too surprising that broadcast networks haven’t won a best drama Emmy since 2006. What does surprise me is that NBC passed on FBI.
“Of course, Dick Wolf is not a time traveler”Um source? God this website now just shamelessly posts unverified claims. Invest in a fact-checker!
I don’t really know what else a Producer does but my guess is that this guy is not checking whether or not live rounds are in every gun used in his shows.
That’s a lot of copoganda.
Yet there are people that complain that there are too many Marvel and Star Wars shows.