Opposites Attract: On Call’s Elliot Wolf and Tim Walsh

Wolf Entertainment’s new police drama, On Call, is unique in several ways. It’s the company’s first scripted streaming series (Amazon Prime Video), has a frenetic half-hour format, and was created by a writing team drawn together from very different backgrounds and with an age gap of nearly two decades between them.

Co-creator and showrunner Tim Walsh grew up in the Chicago area, and despite making a series of poor decisions in his youth that could have landed him in prison, he took advantage of a second chance by earning his GED and working as a security guard while honing his scriptwriting skills. He moved to LA in 2000 and landed his first staff writing gig in 2011, eventually being hired as a staff writer for season one of Wolf Entertainment’s Chicago P.D. where he worked four seasons. Meanwhile, On Call’s co-creator Elliot Wolf—son of legendary TV producer Dick Wolf—had the connections, skills, and opportunity to enter the family business, but also had a drive to earn a name for himself and push Wolf Entertainment into the digital age. We asked them how On Call came to be and how their unconventional writing partnership works.

Paula Hendrickson: Elliot, is it true that On Call was originally pitched as a short-form series for Quibi?

Elliot Wolf: On Call’s origin story is a bit of a roller coaster ride. I initially developed the series as a short form, 10-minute series. The original 10-minute format was really one-off [police] calls because we had been talking to Quibi at the time, and they were really interested in making a series … [Later] when talking with Amazon about it, they said, “We're not in the short-form programming business. Would you come back to us with a pitch for a traditional show?” I needed someone who had experience running a writers' room and was a showrunner. I was lucky enough to meet Tim on what I fondly call sort of a writer's date on Zoom, set up through agents. We started talking about the series, and really, from day one, we just gelled and it felt right.

Paula: Is the 30-minute format a compromise between Tim’s experience with hour-long procedurals and Elliot’s short-form concept, or did other factors lead to half-hour episodes?

Elliot: The half-hour format really came about as a means of business, more so than creative. Look at the half-hours from the 1950s and 1960s primetime schedule. We knew there was a formula for a procedural format that resonated, and saw there were none out in the market today. And as everyone's attention is becoming more valuable, we thought it was a really interesting endeavor to bring that back. Obviously, in the modern landscape, there is an element of serialization that needs to be there with the binge culture on streaming that did not exist in the network format of yesteryear. But that's really how we made the show our own too, by finding the balance between those two and creating something that we think of as wholly new … A lot of folks have dubbed this a procedural, but I always say the through-line of the series is the relationship between the characters. That's the heartbeat of the series as well. Then you have these procedural elements so someone can jump into any episode and at least theoretically enjoy that episode. That was the goal. Then we backed into the story after selling the half-hour format to all the stakeholders and getting them excited about it.

Paula: What strengths do you each bring to your writing partnership?

Tim Walsh: I think the obvious for me is my knowledge of showrunning a room for 12 years. I brought a wealth of information that I accumulated over my career into the room, which I'm sure was helpful for Elliot. [He’s] more business minded than I am, which was really helpful in making sure that the arrow was always pointed toward entertainment and the widest possible audience we could possibly grab. That was the directive from day one.

Elliot: Taking a step back, there's multiple levels of collaboration and the most important collaboration came before the writers’ room: putting pen to paper and sitting down and breaking the season together, the two of us, then coming into the room with a clear direction of what we wanted it to be. The writing process is in large part creative, but there are also political [negotiations] and navigating a network and a studio and a bunch of input from external folks. First and foremost, having a partner to do that with is the difference between insanity and sanity, but more broadly, it was a nice separation of church and state with Tim bringing a ton of experience, and me having worked with the NBCUniversal folks for a long time, being able to navigate all of that stuff too.

Tim: I would just add, for something like this you have to remain egoless. It’d be very easy for either Elliot or I to be attached to ourselves and our egos. Because he sold this show prior to me [coming on board] he could be closed off to his vision, which he never was. It was very attractive to me to come and work with him, because during our first meeting, I asked, “What do you want to do?” and he said, “Whatever you want to do with it.” He was very open and has remained so. And I could have come in with a big head, like, “I've got all this experience. Why do I need to listen to you?” That's an easy recipe for failure anyway. We both remained egoless, and I think that that benefited our process greatly.

Paula:  What advantages do you think your very different life experiences bring to your writing partnership, as opposed to writing with a best friend or someone you grew up with?

Tim: First, I wouldn't recommend people write with their best friends. On one of the shows I was on, there was an older writing team, they were a lot like a couple, and they went to see a marriage counselor every week. They were best friends prior to that. I never want to end up like that. I certainly don't want to end up in therapy with my writing partner.

Elliot: Now, Tim and I are good friends, but coming into On Call, it was all on the basis of, “Let's go make something great.” There's not necessarily the same baggage that comes with a traditional partner in that way. I think that's a little bit of a different mindset than a lot of writing teams who are shopping things together, trying to get staffed together and so forth. So that dynamic helped us.

Tim: I will say it's really not magical. It's very simple. You have to have respect for who you're working with, and you also have to have a firm handle on your ego and remember there's 10 different ways to tell a story, so you can't get attached to one single version or one vision. You have to be open whenever you go into any kind of partnership. You have to be open minded.

Paula: A writing question: Since On Call has so many different cameras going—body cams, security cameras, handheld cameras—do you write that into scripts or do you let the director or cinematographer decide camera angles?

Tim:  It depends if we really want to dazzle on the page and really have it come across the page. You'd say, “Okay, this whole thing is in body cam,” or “This whole thing is in Dash Cam,” or whatever. But often we really wouldn't put much of that in the scripts.

Elliot: An example that was written in the pilot script was the moment that Diaz’s [Brandon Larracuente] body camera catches Harmon [Troian Bellisario] threatening someone. It’s in the script because it's a story point. Anytime it serves story we call it out.

Tim: In the writers’ room, we were always looking for the most interesting visual way to tell the story—that started with Elliot when he sold the show, and we carry that all the way through the writers’ room, into pre-production and into production. We had to do more with less. That was something we would repeat a lot in the room. [Our research included] so many ride-alongs, and you're pretty much on the move all the time. We wanted the audience to feel that in the show. You never really wanted to stop for too long. You really wanted to always be on the move.

Elliot: Dick [Wolf], from day one, was pushing us to make it feel like you're shot out of a cannon with each episode. We take a lot of pride in how tight these episodes are. And from a scripting standpoint, I think that's largely rewriting and putting the time in to get it to be that tight and boiled down to what really matters.

Paula: Anything else you want Script Magazine readers to know?

Tim Walsh We had an incredible writing staff. We made sure that we brought in a broad mix of people. I don't give a shit about your resumé, but I do care about the life you’ve lived. I'm really attracted to people who overcome things in their lives. Because you're essentially going into battle on these shows, you need people with a strong will and who can get through things—people who are obviously good on the page, but also people who have been through life and can bring that life experience to a show like this. I think the show became more three dimensional because our room was three dimensional.