ON CALL: Elliot Wolf and Tim Walsh Preview the Unconventional New Cop Drama

For decades, Wolf Entertainment has had near-constant success on network television, with the LAW & ORDER, ONE CHICAGO, and THE FBIs franchises airing on linear television.

But the company is shaking things up with its new drama, Prime Video’s ON CALL. Not only does this mark Wolf Entertainment’s first scripted streaming show, but the eight-episode first season also has half-hour episodes, which will be released all at once on Thursday, January 9. (LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME, which originally aired on NBC, will be the company’s second streaming series when its upcoming fifth season debuts on Peacock this year.)

It’s a number of calculated big shifts at once for the company, which has produced thousands of hours of episodic television. “I think that half-hour format certainly played into the story that we want to tell, the eight-episode arc,” ON CALL co-creator Elliot Wolf tells Give Me My Remote in the video below. “In terms of being Wolf’s first streaming series, I think we embraced that challenge, but it didn’t necessarily inform any of our story-making decisions. And in terms of it dropping all at once, our hope from day one, regardless of how it was released, is that you really want to watch the next episode. So we’re super excited that the audience is going to get all eight episodes and can sit down and sort of watch it as a movie.”

“We definitely set out to make this as bingeable as possible,” co-creator Tim Walsh adds.

The series follows veteran Long Beach police officer Traci Harmon (Troian Bellisario), who is tasked with training rookie officer Alex Diaz (Brandon Larracuente). (The series also co-stars Eriq La Salle, a longtime behind-the-scenes Wolf Entertainment fixture, as well as Lori Loughlin.) 

Unlike many of the other Wolf Entertainment shows, ON CALL focuses on the officers’ time at work. However, with personal and professional obligations colliding throughout season 1, it also gave the writers an opportunity to tell their stories in a different way.

“I think we take a lot of pride in the fact that you feel like you get to know these characters so well without going home with them,” Wolf notes. “And the dynamic between Harmon and Diaz, in our opinion, is the heart of the series; that’s the true arc of the season. So that was always sort of our guiding light.”

“There’s nothing more interesting to us than putting two people who barely know each other, at very different life stages, in a car for ten-plus hours a day,” he continues. “And we just felt like that was an amazing way to get to know these characters.”

Walsh agrees, comparing their approach to war films, where the cameras would track soldiers throughout their mission. “[In those, you] never went home, you were with them all the time in battles and the bunkers,” he says. “And that was very inspirational for me taking that mindset into this show.”

ON CALL, Series Premiere, January 9, Prime Video

RELATED:

• ON CALL’s Troian Bellisario and Brandon Larracuente Preview Their On-Screen Partnership: ‘It’s Going to Change a Million Different Ways’
• ON CALL: Prime Video Releases New Trailer, Key Art
• ON CALL: Prime Video Sets January Launch for Troian Bellisario-Led Wolf Entertainment Series

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