Making the Call
On Call executive producers Tim Walsh and Elliot Wolf take DQ inside the making of this Prime Video crime procedural, which uses bodycam-style footage to put viewers in the centre of a story about the daily challenges faced by Long Beach police officers.
On night shoots in Long Beach that stretched into the early hours of the morning, Tim Walsh and Elliot Wolf would ask each other if there was anywhere else they’d rather be. The answer was always a resounding ‘no.’
The coastal Californian city, barely 20 miles from the centre of LA, serves as the setting and filming location for Prime Video’s gritty, naturalistic crime drama On Call, which uses bodycam footage to put viewers in the shoes of the officers charged with serving and protecting the local community.
“It was probably one of the best experiences professionally I’ve had. I don’t look back and say, ‘God, that was awful,’” says Walsh, who is also the series showrunner. “If you get an opportunity to go and make something in this day and age, you’re ahead of the game. Elliot and I would look at each other, it’d be three in the morning and we’d say, ‘Where else would you rather be?’ This is what we worked so hard for.”
“We said from the jump that we want this show to feel different and we have the opportunity for it to feel different with a network that’s bought in with experimentation with found footage,” Wolf says. “This is a very rare opportunity to make something that is creatively unique.”
Blending elements of a traditional crime procedural with the stylistic and storytelling freedoms of a streaming platform, On Call follows a rookie and a long-serving officer as they go on patrol in Long Beach, California.
It stars Troian Bellisario (Pretty Little Liars) as officer Traci Harmon, a seasoned 12-year veteran and training officer with a strong moral compass that has defined her approach to policing, even if that puts her at odds with new law enforcement policies. She’s then partnered with Alex Diaz (The Good Doctor’s Brandon Larracuente), an ambitious rookie who grapples with holding on to his optimistic outlook as he realises the challenges he’ll face in today’s climate.
Eriq La Salle (ER) also appears as Sergeant Lasman, with Lori Loughlin (Fuller House) as Lieutenant Bishop and Rich Ting (Tulsa King) as Sergeant Koyama.
Produced by Universal Television and Amazon MGM Studios in association with Wolf Entertainment, the eight-part series marks the first scripted streaming series from famed producer Dick Wolf’s eponymous company (FBI, Law & Order, One Chicago). But the show was initially developed by Elliot Wolf – Dick’s son – as a 10-minute format where each episode followed a single emergency call. Then, prompted by Prime Video, he began to think about it as a half-hour procedural where the arc of the season became the relationship between the drama’s two leads.
But making a police procedural for a streamer, “innately, you approach it a little bit differently because the rules are different on streaming and, as a storyteller, freedom is fun,” Wolf says. “Being able to lift some of the guardrails you get with broadcast network television was really a fun challenge for us, still staying within the Wolf DNA but making it our own. So that was certainly the goal. You want to appeal to the existing fan base, but also you have a rare opportunity to do something in making a streaming show for the first time.”
Walsh joined the project in 2022, having worked on the first four seasons of Chicago PD, and he carried a mantra from that show into the writers room for On Call. “Elliot heard me say many times, I didn’t want to do anything I did in the past,” he says. “To me, this felt like an opportunity to rebrand what has been done before, and we just wanted to make it ours. We knew we were not going to be able to reinvent the wheel, so we just set out to make our own version of it. And at every turn, I would say, ‘If I did this in a network show that I’ve written in the past, I don’t want to do it moving forward.’”
The series begins with the death of a police officer during a traffic stop – a cold open that serves as an entry point into Harmon’s character, while also setting the scene for the challenges the officers in the show will face on a daily basis.
“For us, it was a signal to the audience in some capacity to expect the unexpected,” Wolf says, “which really puts you, as a storyteller, in an opportune spot to then give a realistic portrayal of the day to day, once you and the audience are on the same page with those stakes.”
That being said, “we didn’t want to make these larger-than-life heroes,” says Walsh. “Sometimes in the network shows, they always do the right thing or the good guys win at the end. It really wasn’t good guys and bad guys here. It was just human beings who are flawed.”
What particularly interested them was dramatising the contrasting approaches to policing demonstrated by Harmon and Diaz. On one side is a veteran exhausted by the system, while on the other is a young rookie trying to navigate the complexities of the system for the first time.
“That was just fascinating to get into as a writer,” Walsh continues. “It’s not exactly a new era, a new realm of storytelling. You’ve seen that dynamic before, but for us to have a blank canvas and fill in those characters was really fascinating.”
Researching the series, Walsh, Wolf and other execs joined officers from the real Long Beach Police Department on “dozens” of ridealongs, with many of the emergency calls in the series based on real cases. “The ridealongs were incredibly informative,” Walsh says. “If you wanted to work on the show, you had to get in the car with them. You had to understand, first and foremost, it’s a human being who’s behind the wheel, and then just to experience [the fact that] you’re constantly on the move.
“That’s what we wanted to capture in the show, where there’s this constant movement. Sometimes it was very fun. There were some moments that were quite frightening, as you can imagine. But all in all, that’s where the story lives and dies, with doing the research.”
In the writers room, the show was broken down into a three-hour movie, with the eight episodes split into two chapters, the idea being that episode four would end with somewhat of a conclusion and give the show some breathing space to pick up new threads in episode five. But when running the show, Walsh didn’t like to spend a lot of time actually in the room.
“I’m a big believer in sprinting. You go in there, you’re fresh for an hour and then you leave,” he says. “I don’t think we spent more than a couple hours at a time in the room. It’s diminished returns after that.
“I’ve been on shows where showrunners have kept you ’til eight or nine and then brought you in on the weekends, and those shows were one [season] and done. It didn’t make them any better. I like to come in and stay super focused. We were a very efficient, small room and we just had a lot of fun. We knew what the opportunity was in front of us, an opportunity to do this first streaming show for Wolf and put our stamp on it.”
“It really felt like everyone was invested in making the series great,” says Wolf, “which might sound a little corny but, at the end of the day, it really matters when people are treating it less like a job and more so like a passion project. We were pretty nimble production too, so it was really necessary to treat it that way if we were going to get the product to the place that we wanted it to be.”
The show’s sense of pace and movement was amplified by the use of jerky, grainy and rough first-person bodycam footage, which puts viewers at the centre of the action. It was an element that helped Wolf sell the series in the first place, though he and Walsh were never prescriptive about how and when the footage should be used.
“There is no more relatable lens in the world today than the iPhone. Second to that is probably bodycam footage, given how much it’s in the news and online,” Wolf says. “With that in mind, and knowing we really wanted this series to feel visceral, the original pitch was, ‘Let’s use these found-footage formats to make you feel like you’re riding along with the officers and you’re in the action with them.’”
Once the show went into production, it was down to the actors to take charge of filming that bodycam footage and act as DOPs for the takes. “It was actually a really fun acting challenge for them too,” Wolf observes. “We would have to clear the entire crew out. It’s such a wide-angle lens that you can’t do your traditional blocking. They were in a house or in an alleyway, wherever it was, with just the action and the actors, which is pretty cool. So it was a very fun experiment. There was a lot of experimentation and getting it wrong in order to get it right, so that came with playing with this stuff.”
From day one, Long Beach was also set as the backdrop for the series, chosen both for practicality – its proximity to LA – and because it had the beaches and palm trees they sought from Southern California, while its port raised interesting possibilities for crime stories.
“It’s a really diverse city too,” notes Wolf. “Within a pretty short stretch, you have really affluent communities and communities that are a little bit rougher, and being able to patrol the gambit is super interesting as well.”
Though the future of On Call is uncertain after Prime Video decided not to pick up a second season – it debuted on the streamer at the start of the year – both Walsh and Wolf believe the series is part of a new trend in television – one that emphasises simple storytelling after the wave of serialised dramas that characterised the Peak TV boom of the last decade.
“The show proves that people are ready to just come into something unencumbered and be entertained,” Walsh says. “Perhaps it can provoke some conversations and thought. But On Call proves that getting back to the basics of entertaining people is hopefully where the business is tilted towards.”
“I would love to get back to familiar viewing habits where people can come back to characters they know and love every week,” Wolf says. “Hopefully this post-Peak TV era brings back models that both work for the audience and for the studios and networks. Whether or not they’re ready to fully embrace that, I can’t say and we’ll see what the future holds.
He adds: “What the future holds in terms of the procedural, I know there’s a lot of talk about it, very little walk, but I’m bullish on it. I’m excited about a future where we can get back to also employing crews year-round and keeping people working on shows and characters that the audience loves, pulling a regular job.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Southland: Known for its gritty realism, this NBC and TNT crime series follows the work of the LAPD and the professional and personal lives of its officers.
The Rookie: Nathan Fillion stars in this ABC drama about a middle-aged man who faces scrutiny and uncertainty as the oldest rookie among the ranks of the LAPD.
Bosch: Based on the literary detective created by Michael Connelly, this Prime Video series and its sequel, Bosch: Legacy, follows Harry Bosch, a detective working in the LAPD.
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tagged in: Amazon MGM Studios, Dick Wolf, Elliot Wolf, On Call, Prime Video, Tim Walsh, Universal Television, Wolf Entertainment