A Nero Wolfe Mystery - Production

Production

A Nero Wolfe Mystery is a production of A&E Television Networks and Jaffe/Braunstein Films, Ltd., in association with Pearson Television International. The series was shot in Toronto, with select Manhattan exteriors filmed for the series premiere, "The Doorbell Rang," and seen in subsequent episodes including "Prisoner's Base."

Independent producer Michael Jaffe's efforts to secure the rights to the Nero Wolfe stories date back to his earliest days in the business. In the mid-1970s he was working with his father, Henry Jaffe, a successful attorney turned producer, when the Nero Wolfe rights came on the market. Warner Bros. wanted to adapt the Zeck trilogy for a feature film and approached Henry Jaffe, who traveled to New York to negotiate with the agent for Rex Stout's estate but lost out to Paramount Television.

"We finally got this opportunity," Michael Jaffe said in 2001:

I've been friends with the estate since the early '70s and I had chased the rights numerous times. One of the reasons that I never actually tried to make it as a series was that I didn't believe a network would ever let us make it the right way. Then A&E came along, and Allen Sabinson. I've known him for years and years. He swore he'd let me make it the right way.

The source material for the two seasons of Nero Wolfe was written between 1940 (Over My Dead Body) and 1966 (Death of a Doxy), with most stories written in the 1950s. Jaffe said he chose to set the series in the early 1950s, "because I thought there was so much style that people could identify with and that we could play off. Ultimately, the most important thing is that the audience remain removed from the show by three or four decades. You can't do what Paramount did and update it and make the language modern. The whole thing doesn't make sense, because the tonal idiom doesn't play in the modern world. You have to separate it; you have to create that proscenium arch; you have to create poetic distance—otherwise there's no art in it."

When the series was announced in June 2000, Variety reported that A&E had been licensed to own Nero Wolfe in the U.S. and Canada for an undisclosed fee. Jaffe/Braunstein Films, which retained ownership of the series in the rest of the world, licensed distribution outside the U.S. to Pearson International Television (now FremantleMedia, Ltd.). Producer Michael Jaffe told Variety that the Nero Wolfe episodes would cost $1 million each; sources said the full production cost would be covered by A&E's and Pearson's licensing fees.

"Jaffe/Braunstein was one of the first to experiment with HD for television," reported the industry publication HiDef Magazine:

Their landmark series 100 Centre Street ... was one of the first hour dramas to use HDCam as the capture medium. ... Jaffe/Braunstein was also producing the A&E series Nero Wolfe with Timothy Hutton in 35mm film. After the success with HD, Michael decided that he'd like to try it on the single camera hour drama. At first Hutton was a little nervous about it, but after Jaffe brought experienced DP John Berrie to the program, Hutton was convinced. The entire second season was shot in HD …"

A Nero Wolfe Mystery features production design by Lindsey Hermer-Bell and costume design by Christopher Hargadon. Illustrator Aurore Giscard d'Estaing designed title sequences unique to each episode.