Why Dick Wolf Felt Like ‘Law & Order’ Was a ‘Mercedes’ and ‘Breaking Bad’ Was a ‘Ferrari’
Law & Order is a completely different show from the shorter-lived series Breaking Bad. The former’s creator, Dick Wolf, once confided whether or not he was a fan of the Bryan Cranston series.
Dick Wolf once compared ‘Law & Order’ to ‘Breaking Bad’
Breaking Bad and Wolf’s Law & Order series had two different goals in mind. From the beginning, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan saw the AMC series as a very finite story. In a 2010 interview with Slant, he even shared that Breaking Bad aimed to be nothing like Law and Order.
“We don’t intend to make the show feel like a ‘ripped-from-the-headlines’ show a la Law & Order. This really is a story of a small set of particular characters, Walter White first and foremost among them. And Breaking Bad is truly an investigation of one character’s change, his transformation from a ‘good guy,’ from a law-abiding citizen to a criminal,” Gilligan said.
Meanwhile, Wolf has often stated that Law & Order was inspired by everyday news headlines. When the creator first pitched the series, he told the then-NBC president that the series would be lifted from real-world events.
“When he picked up the show he said, ‘what’s the bible of the show,’ and I said, ‘the front page of the New York Post.’ That’s still true. You can’t make this stuff up. The best stories come out of real life and real people,” Wolf once told Observer.
It’s one of the reasons why Wolf was never worried about running out of Law & Order ideas. Real-life provided enough crimes to fuel Law & Order’s creativity. The nature of the show also allowed the series to have a much longer shelf-life than Breaking Bad, which Wolf intended.
“We’re the company that builds Mercedes, not Ferraris, in the sense that I loved Breaking Bad but it ended after 65 or so episodes that were played out over the course of several years. We’re doing 87 hours of television this year alone,” Wolf said.
How Dick Wolf felt about the lack of critical praise for ‘Law & Order’
Law & Order and its spin-offs like SVU have managed a consistent viewership throughout their run. It could be argued that the series has been more successful than Breaking Bad based on numbers. The latter had very low ratings for the majority of its time on AMC. But its success on Netflix helped explode its viewership numbers.
Although it took Breaking Bad a while to draw eyes to its product, the show was immediately recognized by the Emmys. Bryan Cranston won his first Emmy for Breaking Bad back in 2008. The show would secure three more Emmy wins for Cranston over the course of the series. His Breaking Bad co-stars Anna Gunn and Aaron Paul also earned awards for their contributions to the series. At the tail end of its run, Breaking Bad secured wins for outstanding drama series twice.
Law & Order has received some Emmy love as well. It’s enjoyed several nominations, but few wins. Perhaps its most significant Emmy victory was an Outstanding Drama Series award it earned back in 1997. Mariska Hargitay also won an Outstanding Lead Actress Emmy for her work on SVU in 2006. Over the years, however, Wolf wondered if the Emmys, and critics in general, weren’t as receptive to Law & Order as they used to be.
“Critics don’t like them,” Wolf said in a 2016 interview with The New York Times. “I can’t help that, but they were not critical raves.”
It was noted that the current lack of Emmy attention bothered Wolf to an extent.
“And yet it was just magic,” he said. “One of the five best shows every year just happened.”
Still, it seemed the producer didn’t lose much sleep over it. Especially given the endearing financial success of not only Law & Order but other shows he’d produced like Chicago PD.
“Is it old-fashioned? Or it is comfort food? I much prefer to see it as comfort television. It doesn’t disappoint you. And you can keep coming back and coming back,” Wolf said.
