The financial page; TV on the cheap.(The Talk of the Town)

Six years ago, the cast members of the sitcom "Friends" threatened to walk out unless NBC agreed to renegotiate their contracts. Each of them was earning forty thousand dollars per episode, and they were now demanding six-figure deals. When Dick Wolf, the executive producer and creator of "Law & Order," heard the news, he called Warren Littlefield, then the president of NBC Entertainment, and told him that he should start firing the young stars, one by one. "I guarantee you that Warren would not have had to get rid of more than two of them before they caved," Wolf said recently.

Littlefield did not heed Wolf's advice. NBC gave the cast members a big raise, which was followed, almost four years later, by another big raise. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, the network agreed to pay each of the actors a million dollars per episode. They will now be making twenty-five times what they made in 1996. A good deal -- for the stars, anyway. The show is still popular, but it's not twenty-five times more popular than it was then.

Why did Jennifer Aniston's salary demands bother Wolf enough to make him harangue Littlefield? For one thing, as a producer he had a vested interest in keeping costs down, and he knew that any large contract would ripple through the industry. (Today, he says that what happened in 1996 was "the beginning of a horrifying escalation of performers' salaries.") But Wolf had another reason for objecting to the "Friends" deal: he has built a career on refuting the show-business postulate that stars are the key to television success. To Wolf, paying any actor a million dollars per episode is madness. People tune in to see shows, not celebrities. "I have this sheet of paper, which I always keep with me," Wolf said. On the sheet is a list, made a half-dozen years ago, of actors whom the networks had signed up for future projects. "There are about fifty people on that list," Wolf said. "I think one of them is doing television today."

With "Law & Order" and its two spinoffs -- "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" and "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" -- Wolf has chosen another tack, what you might call franchise television. "Law & Order" is not star-driven, though it does feature well-known actors. It focusses on story and process, rather than on character, recognizing that television is fundamentally a writer's medium. (A few years ago, Wolf sent out cards to network executives that read, "It's the writing, stupid.") Many actors have departed the show without denting its popularity. Some left because they were bored, some because they wanted larger roles, and others because they wanted more money. Paul Sorvino dropped out because he didn't want to shoot episodes outside during the winter -- he feared that recurring bouts of bronchitis would make it impossible for him to ...