Quotes of the Day
In their hearts, many TV producers probably fancy themselves Andy Warhols: pop artists who make the stuff of mass culture and commerce into art, as Warhol did with the Campbell's soup can. Dick Wolf thinks of himself as the Campbell Soup Co. The man who runs the Law & Order empire — on which, thanks to spin-offs and cable repeats, the sun never sets — had a first career in advertising, writing copy for the likes of Crest toothpaste. So it is without irony that he often compares his cop shows to the red-and-white can. "If you like soup, and you see the brand," he says, "you know that you can cook it, and it'll work."
This theory not only has made Wolf into a TV tycoon but also has changed TV drama itself. Wolf produces three L&O series for NBC (Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Law & Order: Criminal Intent) plus a reality series (Crime & Punishment), and he says he already knows what the fourth L&O series will be (we're guessing Law & Order: Hearty Beef with Country Vegetables). The original L&O is a cool-headed procedural and law drama; SVU handles emotion-charged sex-crimes cases; CI is a Columboesque whodunit. But the brand promises certain constants: competent mysteries, intelligent but not intellectual, neatly wrapped up at the end of each episode; a pro-cop attitude; and little mushy stuff about characters' personal lives. For busy viewers, the label is a godsend: decisions, decisions...ah, hell, I'll just open a can of Jerry Orbach! But now Wolf is launching an ambitious new brand: a remake for ABC of Dragnet (Sundays, 10 p.m. E.T.), the 50-plus-year-old cop show that inspired L&O's "Just the facts, ma'am" sensibility.
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Wolf, 56, is able to branch out like this because — in a business in which producers tend to see themselves as the visionaries and see the network brass as the businesspeople — he runs L&O like a CEO. Unlike such micromanagers as The Practice's David E. Kelley or The West Wing's Aaron Sorkin, he delegates heavily to his staff. And because his shows emphasize stories over character development, each actor is replaceable; L&O has run since 1990 without Friends-style salary increases or creative exhaustion. "Other shows eventually descend into a kind of soap opera," says Dragnet executive producer Walon Green. "Dick's shows are really cleverly disguised anthologies." As Dragnet star Ed O'Neill notes, this means Wolf's actors don't get Emmy-clip dramatic scenes. "That 'My kitten died' stuff," he says, "that's just not going to happen."
Today the L&O method is TV's dominant mode of dramamaking. CSI, CSI: Miami, Without a Trace — you can thank Wolf for TV's brand extensions, cop shows with sparingly defined characters and dramas with self-contained, noncontinuing stories. Ironically, Wolf started in TV as a writer for Hill Street Blues, which pioneered TV's previous trend: "story arcs," or plots that stretch out over several episodes or seasons. The approach made creators like Hill Street's Steven Bochco and The X-Files' Chris Carter into auteurs. But business-wise, story arcs are a problem. Much of the money in TV is made from repeats and syndication, and viewers don't like to follow serial stories in reruns. "One of the best cop shows of the '80s was [the serial drama] Wiseguy," says Wolf. "But now it's worthless. Worthless. And with all due respect, because it's very well done, I don't know what 24 is going to be worth in syndication. Are people going to sit home every day for five weeks?"
Wolf says this with a kind of amazement: Don't these people realize TV is a business? It would be too simple, though, to paint him as a bean counter who does nothing for the love of it. Dragnet is a venture of both business and nostalgia; Wolf reminisces about being a cop-smitten tot, getting his parents to let him stay up until 9 p.m. to watch the TV series' debut. But then he shifts gears. "From a business standpoint," he says, "it's hard to launch new names. Everybody knows what Dragnet is. It's a pre-emptive name." That's important to Wolf, who has often stumbled when he has gone off-brand, with flops like Mann and Machine (a cop partners with a cyborg), D.C. (Washington interns wrestle with politics and love) and Deadline (reporter solves crimes). So Dragnet resembles L&O as much as its forebear: more grisly murder cases, less slow-paced police grunt work and plenty of topical plots.
It's a good thing that Wolf's Dragnet is not a slavish copy of the original. However fondly Wolf remembers it, the 1950s version doesn't hold up well, with its establishmentarian stiffness embodied by star-producer Jack Webb as Sergeant Joe Friday. (And that's not counting the camp classic late-'60s revival in which Friday chased hippies on acid.) Casting O'Neill (Married... with Children's Al Bundy) as the new Friday may have raised titters, but O'Neill nails the role, with a hard-bitten empathy that Webb could never touch. The show also makes better use of Friday's voice-over, showing us how a cop processes clues invisible to most of us.
Indeed, Dragnet could use even less Dragnet. It was a mistake to keep the "dum-da-DUM-dum" theme, now irrevocably ironized, and the voice-over, while not so intrusive as Webb's, moralizes too much. There's no need to persuade us that a cop finds serial killers repellent. But as you settle into the show's rhythms and well-crafted plots, you forget these glitches. You could almost be watching Law & Order.
Which is a compliment and a problem. If Dragnet is crisp and absorbing, it's also one more police procedural on a TV dial that, owing to L&O, is glutted with them. Wolf likes the Campbell's soup analogy, but another apt one is Starbucks. The coffee chain's Hun-like conquest of retail America crowded out smaller, idiosyncratic cafes, but now you can get a nice French roast even in burgs where your only choice was once a cup of steaming 10W-40 from the doughnut shop. Thanks to the Law & Order-ing of TV, there is little reason to watch a bad cop show — and fewer opportunities to watch anything but a cop show.
Not that viewers mind; in November, an aggregate 96 million people watched an L&O series somewhere on TV. For Wolf, the only drawback is that he essentially is competing against himself: CI airs on NBC the hour before Dragnet. "The hope is that at 10, the fan base will switch over to ABC," says Wolf, "and then switch over to USA and watch SVU [reruns]." You can run, viewers. And you can hide. But now more than ever, there is no escaping the long arm of Dick Wolf.
- James Poniewozik