The king of network TV wants to reinvent streaming with his latest show

Around 2010, American producer Dick Wolf's vast television empire was suddenly coming undone.

- John Koblin

First, NBC abruptly cancelled his network mainstay, Law & Order (1990 to present). It had been on the air for two decades, a move that stunned his small production company.

A year later, two Law & Order spin-offs were unceremoniously shown the door. All that was left was Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999 to present), a relatively slim slate for a company that prized multiple lines of revenue and that had made Wolf a very rich man.

The TV industry was migrating away from a decades-old staple that had made Wolf a dominant figure in prime-time viewing: the close-ended "procedural". That popular genre of programming presented a conflict and a tidy resolution, all within an hour's time.

Instead, streaming outlets such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu were beginning to take flight, prestige TV was ascendant, and complex, serialized programming was all the rage. Farewell, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000 to 2015) and Law & Order; hello, The Crown (2016 to 2023) and Big Little Lies (2017 to 2025).

In recent years, as Hollywood studios slashed budgets and bid adieu to the Peak TV era, Wolf's style of programming is coming back into vogue.