“The appeal for me was Dick Wolf,” says Lori Loughlin of On Call, the new half-hour police drama coming to Prime Video on January 9, 2025. “You know you’re going to get into the room with some really good people and it’s going to be a good ride.”
The series, shot with a mixture of hand-held cameras, bodycam, and dash-cam footage, centers on a training officer (Troian Bellisario‘s Harmon) and her new rookie (Brandon Larracuente‘s Diaz) as they patrol in Long Beach, California. Loughlin plays Lieutenant Bishop, and Eriq La Salle (also an executive producer and director) stars as Sergeant Lasman.
Loughlin felt fortunate that they thought of her for the role and shares with TV Insider that LaSalle “was really pushing for me from the beginning. It’s a role that I never played before, and it was very challenging and very different for me. Eriq really was my cheerleader. My way of handling things is to be diplomatic. And he was like, ‘Listen, you can be diplomatic, but you’re unapologetic. We’re going to go for it. You have the strength, you’re going to do it.’ And he just pushed me, and once I got comfortable, it was very liberating and very freeing.”
La Salle (who has worked with Wolf Entertainment in the past on One Chicago, Law & Order, and FBI shows) points to the “layered” scripts. “Actors just have fun with this kind of stuff. This is the stuff that we long for, we hunger for,” he explains. “[Executive producers] Tim [Walsh] and Elliot [Wolf] gave us great food to feast upon. We never had to make sense of the scripts.” And as a director, he was able to go “even deeper,” with “more layers,” he adds. “I make that demand of myself, but of the actors [as well].”
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Loughlin says it was “a dream come true” to be directed by him. “It’s always wonderful when an actor is there to help you, especially when you’re establishing a new character and you’re trying to find the character’s voice,” she tells us. “He had such incredible notes and insight for me.” La Salle directed the pilot, and so Loughlin credits him and his team with “that sense of the energy and being a character that [will allow] the audience [to] feel like they are a character in the show.”
And the characters at the heart of it are Harmon and Diaz, who will be getting a feel for each other as the audience is.
“I don’t want to toot my own horn, but I think you really couldn’t ask for anyone better as a training officer,” says Bellisario. Being a training officer “is something you have to choose to do. There were a few officers who told us, ‘I was not interested in doing that. I don’t have the disposition for it.’ You do have to have a specific personality. [Harmon] has it. She wants to teach, she wants to actually shape that next generation of police.”
Looking at Diaz, she “appreciates” his energy more than she lets show. Due to events that happen before they begin to work together, “she’s got to lead a little bit more with tough love,” previews Bellisario. That being said, “She’s genuinely happy to have somebody who wants to do this.”
Diaz is someone “with a lot of optimism and with a lot of energy just to do good,” says Larracuente.
When it comes to what he knows about Harmon, at first, that’s just what others tell him. “Throughout the series, certain characters drop little doubts into Diaz’s mind about who Harmon is, which makes him question her character,” Larracuente reveals. We’ll see that change as they ride together.
Erin Simkin/Prime Video
As he notes, “We never go home with these characters. We’re always with them in the car, so we get to see them as they process situations. We get to see them as they are. Sometimes they come into a scene with something that happened in their personal life and sometimes we might not be as pleasant as we probably should be, but we’re unapologetically ourselves.”
For La Salle and Loughlin, their characters were a chance to do something different. “[We’ve] been in the industry for a very long time and have had success, but still, ironically, we’re almost typecast for the opposite reasons. They always want me to be the stern and blah blah blah and just that. And they want her to be the girl next door,” he notes. “It was just a wonderful opportunity for all of us and everyone just stepped up to the plate. And I think everyone recognized it as that and treated it as that, and they devoured it as that. So I’m really proud of it.”
Adds Loughlin, “When you get something special, when you get a script and it’s so special, you’re like, oh, it’s magic.”
On Call, Series Premiere (all episodes), Thursday, January 9, 2025, Prime Video
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