In life, every fight has a price.

Once a Week for Life follows Lieutenant Adam Galanis, a moral masochist and Navy SEAL veteran turned NYPD fugitive hunter, as he navigates a New York where loyalty is currency, corruption is law, and survival costs more than anyone admits, a truth the public may suspect but never expects to face. I am George Zouvelos, a writer, director, and native New Yorker from Astoria, Queens. For more than five decades, I have lived and worked on the streets where my stories, including Once a Week for Life,  were born and unfold. I have seen steel burn, men bend, and humanity itself break. I have seen truth vanish and the wicked prevail, but I hold on to hope. Because where there is light in humanity, and as long as the sun rises in the East, there is goodness. I write about both. Today, when trust is thinning and institutions strain under pressure, this story asks what happens to a man when the system he served demands a price he cannot afford. But facts alone do not make me a storyteller, nor do titles make a filmmaker. Once a Week for Life is no abstract crime tale. It is drawn from life, crafted with intent, and woven with truth. I know these streets and these codes because I lived them, and I know the men behind the uniforms because I stood among them. These stories come from lived reality, where loyalty collides with betrayal, faith with survival, community with corruption, all teetering on the razor’s edge, where even the powerful are cut down.

At the center of the saga stands Lieutenant Adam Galanis. Anchoring the first two films of this three-part journey, with the depth and complexity to carry an ongoing series, Galanis is torn between duty, loyalty, and survival. Bombastic, sardonic, cunning, yet deeply scarred, he is a Navy SEAL veteran turned NYPD fugitive hunter, a hunter of men. His flaws are not theatrical invention. Addiction, PTSD, gluttony, rage, humor, and vengeance coexist within him, just as they did in men I have known, in the uniforms I once wore, and in real individuals forced to carry them.

In Adam, myth and man converge. He looms larger than life, yet he is no superhero, no celebrity idol, and Once a Week for Life is no recycled mob fairytale. His world is one where sometimes what is, is not, and what is not, is. Once a Week for Life I begins as an intimate tale of one cop’s war with mob bosses, traitors, and his own compulsions. Once a Week for Life II expands to systemic corruption, City Hall, Internal Affairs, the mob, and fractured alliances that mirror the way institutions collapse when the stakes are highest.

My goal as director is to make these films both authentic and operatic. Authentic in their details, Astoria’s people, diners, food trucks, pizzerias, parks, highways, bocce courts, LaGuardia’s roar, the Hell Gate Bridge, and in the sardonic humor of men I knew, some now in the ground, not by choice. Once a Week for Life is Adam’s odyssey, a modern Greek tragedy. New York is the stage. Betrayal and revelation are the chorus. Adam’s journey is the heart. Once a Week for Life I and Once a Week for Life 2 are not crime stories. They are human ones, told with the force of a gifted ensemble, without Hollywood glam, obvious clichés, or expected turns of events. This saga is rooted in truth, culture, and ambition, forged by vision, grit, audacity, and relentless tenacity to create a New York crime epic that resonates like the classics, yet speaks in a voice that is unmistakably my own.

I am always open to collaboration with producers and partners who value authenticity, and who want to build the kind of synergy that moves remarkable stories from the page to the screen.

George Zouvelos

Creator, Writer, Director, Narrator, and Producer

Once a Week for Life