Wealth & Money Quote by Dick Wolf

Everybody knows things are not the same is Dick Wolf doing what veteran showrunners do best: compressing an entire industry’s power shift into a sentence that sounds casual enough to slip past defenses. He’s not reminiscing about a golden age of TV; he’s pointing at a new scoreboard. The old story was that television was the “cheap seats” compared to film, culturally and financially. Wolf’s line assumes that hierarchy is dead, and that everyone in the room knows it, even if they still pretend otherwise.

The second sentence lands like a producer’s aside that’s actually a warning. “The people running the TV end” of a vertically integrated company isn’t just a description of bosses; it’s a map of where leverage lives now. Vertical integration means the same corporate organism can greenlight the show, own the studio, control distribution, and monetize the back end. When Wolf says they “know how much money a successful show can make,” the emphasis is on know: they have data, precedent, and a direct line to profit. That knowledge changes behavior. It justifies safer bets, franchise logic, and longer-running procedural engines that can be resold, streamed, clipped, and exported.

Wolf’s subtext is pragmatic, not romantic. In a world where TV hits can be annuities, creative decisions aren’t merely artistic; they’re capital strategy. The line reads like a hard-earned acknowledgment that the medium’s prestige didn’t change the game as much as ownership did.