December 20: Happy Birthday Dick Wolf

[TMC]

https://lebeauleblog.com/2017/12/20/...d-irene-dunne/

Emmy-winning television producer Dick Wolf turns 71 today. After graduating from Penn, he worked for a decade as an advertising copywriter, before selling his first screenplay in 1978, for a film titled Skateboard. He wrote several more screenplays in the eighties, and also wrote for series like Miami Vice and Hill Street Blues. At the end of the decade, he had an idea for a series that would be a hybrid of a police procedural and a courtroom drama—the first half of a show would focus on the investigation of a crime, the second on the prosecution of the criminals.

Law & Order was not an instant success. It wasn’t until its fifth season that it began to win a sizable audience. But it went on to run for twenty seasons on NBC, tying Gunsmoke as the longest-running scripted primetime series ever. As it became a bigger success in the late 1990s, it evolved into a franchise. The first spinoff series: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, has become a long-runner itself, currently in its nineteenth season. It was followed by Law & Order: Criminal Intent (which lasted “only” ten seasons), two short-lived spinoffs, and the anthology series Law & Order True Crime.


Wolf has an Emmy for producing on Law & Order, and a second for the TV movie Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. In addition to continued involvement in Law & Order: SVU, Wolf has created another family of shows, the Chicago franchise (no prize for guessing where it’s set). Chicago Fire was the first to air, beginning in 2012, and has been followed by Chicago P.D., Chicago Med, and the short-lived Chicago Justice.