CHICAGO TIMES THREE
The story behind the Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., Chicago Med crossover episodes,
CHICAGO— Joe Minoso, who plays firefighter Joe Cruz on Chicago Fire, knows he’s about to make history. “What actor can say they’re going to play the same character on three different shows in one week?”
Minoso is one of several actors crossing between Chicago Fire, Chicago Med and Chicago P.D. in what NBC is billing as #OneChicago.
NBC runs the three-hour story arc Tuesday and Wednesday; Global works each episode into its schedule over three nights starting with Fire Monday at 9 p.m., followed by Med (Tuesday at 7 p.m.) and P.D. (Wednesday at 7 p.m.).
It’s a three-hour TV event or, minus commercials, a two-hour and 10minute movie.
“I’m always looking for opportunities to jolt our schedule,” says NBC chairman Robert Greenblatt, who joined the cast and producers recently at the tail end of a busy media day held in the Windy City.
The story finds members of Firehouse 51 awaiting word of the fate of one of their own at the busy Chicago County Hospital. Also, in a “ripped from the headlines” story line, a woman undergoing chemotherapy treatment is rescued from a burning building. After she’s examined on Med, the P.D. team is called in to investigate after three other female patients are found to have been needlessly poisoned by chemo — all by the same doctor.
Logistically, it helps that interiors for the three shows are all shot on neighbouring sound stages in what was once a mammoth Chicago factory. Still, show-jumping on this scale is no easy task, says Oliver Platt, who plays chief of psychiatry Dr. Daniel Charles on the newest series, Chicago Med.
“Even within that three-act structure, each of those shows have to stand on their own as a satisfying hour of television,” he says. “This is bringing serialization to the onehour procedural in a way I don’t think anybody’s done before.”
Leading the charge is someone who’s never been afraid to test TV’s limits: creator and executive producer Dick Wolf. He helped shake things up with crossover episodes 20 years ago of his popular series Law & Order and a series he admires but didn’t produce, Homicide: Life on the Street.
“The two years we did them, they were the two highest rated episodes of those shows,” says Wolf, a master salesman as well as a showman.
He was all set to do a three-series crossover nearly 15 years ago on three of his L&O series. It was going to be a five-hour miniseries dealing with terrorists who cross the Canadian border into New York and launch a deadly attack in Times Square in Manhattan, killing 2,500 people.
“Two weeks away from the start of the shoot, 9/11 happened and it never got made,” says Wolf.
The busy producer plans to do another crossover in February, this time with the long-running Law & Order SVUmixed in with his Chicago shows.
He teases that there will be “a reappearance of somebody who was very, very bad” on that multi-series event.
Actors involved in the Chicago crossover say they’re up for more as long as the stories make sense. “It’s always impressive to me how the writers find a way to make all three shows cohesive in one story like that,” says P.D.’ s Brian Geraghty. “Good gosh, that’s a feat.”
Eamonn Walker, who plays battalion Chief Wallace Boden on Fire, feels mixing these three shows is “a natural progression. The real-life police, medical and fire departments see each other every single day.”
Sometimes that’s around a hand sanitizer in emergency, suggests Fire’s Kara Killmer; other times it’s later in the bar. She observed cops, firefighters and medical workers with close ties during her ride-alongs leading up to the series.
Even when these shows aren’t in crossover mode, the mixing is implied. P.D.’ s snarky desk sergeant Trudy Platt (Amy Morton), for example, is the girlfriend of firefighter Randy “Mouch” McHolland (Christian Stolte).
Matt Olmstead, who’s been show- runner on all three dramas, expects to do two of these major crossovers each season. He says network testing revealed viewers weren’t that keen on minor crossovers and wanted more major ones.
“They’re all hard to do,” he says. “I have no problem getting rid of the mid-level ones at all.”
The actors seem up for it. “It’s like getting another job in a way,” says Geraghty, although he doesn’t get three times the pay.
“Not yet,” he says. “Working on that.”