TV at the Pollock: Dick Wolf: Writing Television Past, Present, and Future

Emmy and Grammy award-winning producer and New York Times best-selling author Dick Wolf sits among television’s greatest creator/producers and is the architect of one of the most successful brands in the history of television: Law & Order. He serves as creator and executive producer of all of the Law & Order-branded series, including Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which recently made television history with its historic twenty-first season. In the past decade, Wolf extended his television world with his Chicago-based NBC franchise: Chicago Fire; Chicago P.D., and Chicago Med. His latest high profile project, the new CBS series FBI, was the network’s top-rated new drama series for 2018-2019 television season, and this success has already spawned the spinoff FBI Most Wanted, giving Wolf six scripted series on network broadcast television.

Wolf’s television work also extends into non-fiction, having served as executive producer of the Fox series First Responders Live, and the critically-acclaimed Oxygen trio: Murder for Hire, Cold Justice, and Criminal Confessions. He also executive produced USA’s docu-series Inside the FBI: New York, and the successful A&E series Nightwatch and its spinoffs. Wolf’s company also produced two award-winning documentaries: Twin Towers and When You’re Strange, the Grammy Award-winning documentary about The Doors. In 2007, Wolf executive produced the critically-acclaimed HBO original movie Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which won six Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Made for Television Movie. In addition to his work in television, Wolf has published a trilogy of thriller novels – The Intercept, The Execution and The Ultimatum – that have met with popular and critical acclaim.

His personal accolades include induction to the Television Academy Hall of Fame; the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Lifetime Achievement Award; the Producer’s Guild of America’s Norman Lear Showmanship Award; the DGA Honors; the Governor’s Award by the New York Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences; the Achievement Award from the Caucus for Producers, Writers, and Directors; the Television Showman of the Year Award from the Publicist’s Guild of America;  the Monte Carlo Television Festival Gold Nymph Award; the Award of Excellence from the Banff Television Festival; and NATPE’s Brandon Tartikoff Award. On March 29, 2007, Wolf received a star on Hollywood’s world-famous Walk of Fame.

Wolf is an Honorary Consul of Monaco and is actively involved in the principality’s annual Monte Carlo Television Festival and is its primary liaison with the entertainment community. He is also the founder (with Marcy Carsey) of the Carsey-Wolf Center, and a member of its external advisory board. He is a benefactor to numerous philanthropic endeavors including MOXI, the Wolf Museum of Exploration and Innovation, the Alliance for Children’s Rights and the Princess Grace Foundation and, through his Wolf Family Foundation, endowed the new Wolf Theatre at the Television Academy.

Patrice Petro is Professor of Film and Media Studies, Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, and Presidential Chair in Media Studies. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of twelve books, including The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (with Kristin Hole, Dijana Jelaca, and E. Ann Kaplan, 2017), Teaching Film (2012), Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s (2010), Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror” (2006), and Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (2002). She served two terms as President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the largest U.S. professional organization for college and university educators, filmmakers, historians, critics, scholars, and others devoted to the study of the moving image.