Audiences love to visit the version of Chicago that super producer Dick Wolf and NBC has brought to us for many seasons now with Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D. and Chicago Med, and the success of the yearly mega crossover episodes are ample proof of that. The One Chicago crossovers always pull out all the stops to keep fans on the edge of their seats, but this season's event is promising to be bigger and even more ambitious than ever.
Derek Haas, who is the showrunner behind Chicago Fire, has revealed that two particular classic action movies are being used as inspiration for the upcoming three-episode crossover, and there's a specific reason why these films were chosen to guide what we'll see from the very special episodes this year.
We were thinking of like Poseidon Adventure or like Independence Day, where you’ve got a bunch of stories — cutting to one, cutting to another — and there’s a mystery, both medical and criminal, going on that we’re trying to solve before it gets out of hand.
Ooooh! Well, those are certainly two intriguing and action-packed classics to pull from when putting together this year's Chicago crossover. Derek Haas has the measure of both movies when he mentions how each of them put smaller stories in play for groups of characters that fed into the overall plot. This is exactly the kind of storytelling we want from our giant Chicago crossover night. And, you know, if they throw in some alien invasions or tidal waves, that would make for some awesome drama, too.
Now, Haas also mentioned that there will be a mystery that is both medical and criminal that will be a big feature of this event, and while he, of course, didn't spell out the details on these, I'm not surprised that they are very much related puzzles, because that is just how the Chicago shows roll most of the time. At any rate, he did spill that the whole night will, in fact, kick off with said medical mystery courtesy of a strange illness, so we can probably count on things being touch and go, full tilt, for three hours.
According to what Derek Haas told TVLine, this crossover (which was conceived by himself and Dick Wolf) will be written solely by him, meaning that he's writing not only Chicago Fire's portion, but Chicago Med and Chicago P.D., as well. Haas also noted that fans can expect all three hours to feel a lot more cohesive than they usually do, even for crossover night.
I haven’t written Med since we did the Med [spinoff] episode. But you’ll see why that’s feasible, because it’s less about each show having its own shape to it and more like all three shows really intertwined throughout. You could be watching any hour and be like, ‘Oh, wait, is this P.D.? Or is this Med? Or is this Fire?’ We’re even doing scenes that you would think would be a Med scene, but it’s in the Fire hour.
Who else is getting epic, disaster movie vibes from the idea behind this crossover and how Derek Haas is setting it up? I have to say, I'm loving the idea of blending everything together to really keep us riveted for the entire three hours.
The full Chicago lineup will be back on September 25, and we can all see how things turn out when the crossover event hits NBC on October 16, starting with Chicago Fire, leading into Chicago Med and wrapping up with Chicago P.D.
