By this time next year, give or take a few months maybe, Dick Wolf will have put his name on more than 84 seasons of television on NBC. That’s more seasons than the man has been alive for! Hell, TV itself has only been around for a few more seasons than that!
Of course, Dick Wolf is not a time traveler, so he has accomplished this by producing a veritable crap-load of TV shows all at the same time, and that’s not going to stop any time soon: According to The Hollywood Reporter, NBC has renewed all six of his currently running shows—that’s Law & Order: SVU, the rebooted regular Law & Order, spin-off Law & Order: Organized Crime, windy firefighter show Chicago Fire, windy cop show Chicago PD, and windy doctor show Chicago Med—for new seasons. This will be season 25 for SVU and 23 for regular Law & Order (which was off the air for a little more than a decade and will likely hit 500 episodes with this renewal).
And lest you think those Chicago shows are newcomers to the Dick Wolf scene, this will be season 12 for Fire, 11 for PD, and nine for Med. Add all of that to Organized Crime’s four seasons and you have 84 seasons of television… but Wolf has been creating NBC shows for a long-ass time, and those 84 seasons don’t even include things that are no longer on the air. There’s also Nasty Boys and Mann & Machine and Law & Order: Trial By Jury and Law & Order: LA and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. By our count, that puts him at least a little over 100 on NBC alone, so it’s no wonder that the network just keeps throwing time slots at him.
Imagine being the person in charge of filling out a TV network’s schedule, and one man has been semi-responsible for giving you something to put on TV over 100 times. Sometimes they’re Law & Order and sometimes they’re whatever the hell Nasty Boys was, but at least they’re all something. That’s a man you want in your corner.
