As part of the press day for the upcoming series On Call, we participated, along with few other outlets, in roundtable interviews with series co-creators and EPs Tim Walsh and Elliot Wolf. This isn’t your typical procedural, and the series’ shorter runtime is a huge part of what makes it unique. Because of this, we wanted Walsh and Wolf’s perspective on producing episodes that, based on genre, would normally fit a one-hour block…in a 30-minute format. Were there any drawbacks? And what was appealing about this length?
“Well, the appeal is that it’s not an hour, and we don’t have to write an hour-long script,” Walsh deadpanned. Wolf continued, “I don’t know that there is a true drawback, so much as a challenge.” Even in the condensed timeframe, he told us, “we want to allow the audience to really get to know these characters…we are essentially doing the length of a very long movie in eight half-hour episodes.” For Wolf and Walsh, their “goal is, first and foremost, to create a bond between the audience and these characters and find the humanity in the characters…We always see them as humans first — that happen to be police officers — and very quickly, you understand what they do day-to-day and the danger of the job. But ultimately, we really want you to understand them. So in four hours, [it’s] difficult, but we took our best swing at it.”
On the partnership at “heart” of On Call
Speaking of finding the humanity in On Call‘s characters, a release sent to journalists noted that “the heart of On Call has always been the ongoing evolution of Harmon [Troian Bellisario] and Diaz’s [Brandon Larracuente] relationship.” So, we asked if, in building either that central relationship or the equally-important relationship between the characters and the audience, anything unexpected occurred during the process. As Wolf put it, “the scripts are the scripts,” and “the story itself was very much on the page.” But that doesn’t mean the cast didn’t have a role (no pun intended). “What I will say is that Troian, Brandon, and the entire ensemble did an amazing job of bringing these characters to life. And we realized more about these characters once they inhabited them.”
Watch our interview with Tim Walsh & Elliot Wolf here
On Call trailer
Stay tuned for more about On Call, which streams on Prime Video on January 9, 2025.
