
EXCLUSIVE: Dick Wolf’s Universal TV-based production company is having an active development season under new scripted development executive Danielle Gelber. Last month, NBC bought a firefighter drama from feature writers Michael Brandt and Derek Haas. Now I’ve learned that Wolf Films has set up two more hourlong projects at NBC — one from The L Word creator Ilene Chaiken and one from former Smallville executive producers Todd Slavkin and Darren Swimmer — that put a twist on two classic franchises, medical and cop dramas. In addition to the writers, each show is executive produced by Wolf, Wolf Films president Peter
Jankowski and Gelber. The untitled Chaiken project centers on a lesbian couple who are doctors at an inner-city Philadelphia hospital. The Slavkin/Swimmer project is a high-tech character-driven procedural about investigators who go into the memory banks of murder victims in order to solve the crimes. This is the second sale this development season for Chaiken, who spent the past eight years at Showtime working on her drama The L Word and its reality offshoot. A character-driven procedural she is writing and executive producing with Joel Silver landed at CBS last week with a put pilot commitment. Swimmer and Slavkin spent seven years on Smallville, rising to executive producers. They most recently worked on ABC’s No Ordinary Family.
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I hope all of Dick Wolf’s projects FAIL. He fired SKEET ULRICH and I won’t forgive him for that.
The Slavkin/Swimmer procedural sounds interesting. Law & Order meets Inception, perhaps? Glad to hear Dick Wolf has new projects in the works
Really? That premise sounds incredibly stupid to me.
Unlike “Nancy” above, I hope Mr. Wolf’s projects succeed brilliantly and last for a decade. He is one of my favorite creators.
This is unfair, but given Dick’s recent track record with NBC on a handful of Law and Order spin-offs, then my bet would have to be that anything he does from now on is doomed.
The Law and Order franchise was create in a different TV era, and from the looks of it Dick has lost touch with reality. There is NO other way to explain why him and bloody useless NBC didn’t pay Meloni what he wanted to stay with the show.
Oh come on… we celebrate successes like this? Dick Wolf at NBC? If he can’t sell at NBC no one can. But maybe he can’t so he brings in Bob G’s development person, Danielle Gelber and she sells to her former boss. It’s so inside as to be laughable. And a second position on an Ilene Chaiken idea? Really?
Wait, is this about the Penny Arcade project?
To such a wonderful Creator of moving stories for our time, Cheers.