Dick Wolf did not invent the police hour; he found the shape that lets it run indefinitely. Law & Order is plainly made, well acted and entirely sure the system works, and after a few episodes that certainty is the thing you are watching.
Fi1m perspective
Every episode of Law & Order does the same thing at the same minute. A body turns up, two detectives work through the people who did not do it, and at the half hour the case leaves their hands for good. The prosecutors take it, argue it, and there is a verdict before the credits. Nothing carries over from one half to the other except the crime, and very little carries over from one week to the next. That is Dick Wolf's contribution to television: not a story but a shape, and a shape strong enough to have held since 13 September 1990.
He did not start as a builder. He wrote advertising copy in New York before he wrote scripts, and his first television work in the 1980s was on other people's programmes: episodes of Hill Street Blues (1981) and Miami Vice (1984), where he wrote and co-produced. We rate both of those series higher than anything he made himself, though our reviews do not single out his episodes, and it would be a stretch to hand him credit for what made them good. What he plainly took from them was a working knowledge of how a police hour is put together. In 1990 he took two kinds of programme that already existed, the cop show and the courtroom show, bolted them together and let the format do the work.
The rest is franchise. Law & Order ran to 2010 and came back in 2022. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999) has outlasted it. Chicago Fire (2012), Chicago P.D. (2014), Chicago Med (2015) and the FBI series from 2018 followed, built so their characters can walk from one into another. Wolf has said: "For years I went hoarse saying 'Law and Order' is a brand. It's like Crest." He was not joking. Arthur W. Forney has run his post-production since the first season of Law & Order, which tells you how the machine stays consistent: the same hands on the cut, decade after decade.
Whether that is a virtue depends on what you want from an evening. The stories are lifted from the week's news, the writing is plain and the actors are usually better than what they are given. After a few episodes we found we had stopped following the cases and were watching the certainty itself, the promise that the system will have it sorted before the credits. The standing complaint is that he stopped inventing and started manufacturing, and we would not argue. School Ties (1992), his feature screenplay, shows he could do something else and largely chose not to.
Watch one episode of Law & Order to see what he does. Watch twenty to find out whether it works on you, because it either does or it does not, and Wolf has never seemed much troubled either way.
Biography
Dick Wolf is an American television writer, producer and creator. Born Richard Anthony Wolf on 20 December 1946 in New York City, he attended the University of Pennsylvania. He began his career in advertising before moving into screenwriting and then television.
He wrote for the series Hill Street Blues in the mid-1980s and for Miami Vice. In 1990 he created Law & Order, which ran for 20 seasons on NBC and spawned multiple spin-offs. He is also the co-creator of the Chicago franchise, including Chicago Fire (2012), Chicago P.D. (2014) and Chicago Med (2015), and the FBI franchise beginning in 2018.
Wolf has received two Primetime Emmy Awards and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He has written books including the non-fiction Law & Order: Crime Scenes.
