Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.
For executive producer Dick Wolf’s first scripted streaming series, “On Call” co-creators Tim Walsh (“Chicago P.D.,” “Hightown”) and Elliot Wolf (Dick Wolf’s son who was an executive producer on the unscripted series “Law & Order: Criminal Justice System”) developed a half-hour drama that follows Long Beach, Calif., training officer Traci Harmon (Troian Bellisario, “Pretty Little Liars”) and her rookie, Alex Diaz (Brandon Larracuente, “The Good Doctor”), as they patrol the streets while searching for a cop killer.
It’s a visceral, high-adrenaline series that puts viewers in the cop car in a way that’s reminiscent of the 2009-13 show “Southland.” (“On Call” features mostly hand-held camera work and uses all practical locations; no sets on a soundstage.)
In a Zoom interview last month, Walsh and Wolf said they felt the half-hour format lent itself to modern viewing habits.
“Attention has never been more valuable in the world that we live in,” Elliot Wolf said, adding that the half-hour format is also a throwback: 1950s and 1960s procedural cop shows were often 30 minutes in length.
“On Call,” now streaming all eight first-season episodes on Amazon’s Prime Video, is more serialized and less of a procedural — again, shades of “Southland” — although Walsh cites “The Shield” and “Adam-12” as inspirations for “On Call.”
“The idea was you have these one-off calls, and that’s one of the beauties of patrol from a storytelling standpoint: You have to expect the unexpected, from the mundane to the life-altering and you never know what’s coming next,” Elliot Wolf said. “But when we actually started breaking (story for) the show, what we found is the real serialization is the relationship between Harmon and Diaz, and that’s the heart of the series.”
I’ve covered TV long enough to recall Television Critics Association press tours where Dick Wolf railed against serialized storytelling.
“He has mellowed on that,” Elliot Wolf said. “But you’ll notice we never go home with our cops. Compared to a lot of (Dick Wolf-produced) series where we have an active investigator chasing a crime or criminal, this series in large part is a day in the life. And what you get out of that is mundane time in between the calls in the car, and we take a lot of pride in building the relationship between our leads in that time.”
Walsh said the pair looked to other Wolf shows as an example of what they did not want “On Call” to be.
“No slight to those shows,” Walsh said, “but we wanted this to stand on its own and be as unique as it could possibly be.”
Among the unexpected aspects of “On Call” is the casting of “Full House” veteran Lori Loughlin against type as no-nonsense boss Lt. Bishop. Walsh and Elliott Wolf acknowledged putting profanity in the mouth of an actress known for wholesome roles in “Fuller House” and “When Calls the Heart” had its appeal.
“Everybody who watches the show loves that (moment),” Walsh said of a profanity-laced Bishop scene in the premiere episode. “It was a thrill.”