"If the scripts are not good, I'll tell somebody, 'This isn't good.'"
About this Quote
There is a blunt kind of luxury in being able to say, "This isn't good", and Dick Wolf knows exactly what that buys you. In a business built on fragile egos, endless notes, and the polite theater of "let's explore options", his line reads like a producer's version of creative hygiene: name the problem early, keep the machinery moving, protect the brand.
The intent is managerial, but the subtext is power. Wolf isn't describing a preference; he's describing a permission structure. Only someone with leverage - the guy whose name is effectively a franchise logo - can afford the clean sentence. The repetition of "good" is doing work, too. It's not "innovative" or "prestige" or "award-worthy". It's "good": a deliberately plain standard that fits his most famous output, shows engineered to deliver clarity, pace, and reliability at scale. That baseline is the point.
Context matters: Wolf is the architect of assembly-line television, where writers' rooms and production schedules don't allow for preciousness. The statement signals a culture where direct criticism is framed as professionalism, not cruelty - a way to prevent bad scripts from metastasizing into expensive shoot days and compromised episodes. It also quietly rebukes the industry's tendency to confuse diplomacy with taste. Wolf's ethos is that "nice" is optional; competence isn't. And in a long-running franchise economy, that pragmatism becomes a kind of artistic stance: not anti-art, but pro-standards.
The intent is managerial, but the subtext is power. Wolf isn't describing a preference; he's describing a permission structure. Only someone with leverage - the guy whose name is effectively a franchise logo - can afford the clean sentence. The repetition of "good" is doing work, too. It's not "innovative" or "prestige" or "award-worthy". It's "good": a deliberately plain standard that fits his most famous output, shows engineered to deliver clarity, pace, and reliability at scale. That baseline is the point.
Context matters: Wolf is the architect of assembly-line television, where writers' rooms and production schedules don't allow for preciousness. The statement signals a culture where direct criticism is framed as professionalism, not cruelty - a way to prevent bad scripts from metastasizing into expensive shoot days and compromised episodes. It also quietly rebukes the industry's tendency to confuse diplomacy with taste. Wolf's ethos is that "nice" is optional; competence isn't. And in a long-running franchise economy, that pragmatism becomes a kind of artistic stance: not anti-art, but pro-standards.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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