NBC has been home to one of the most successful television franchises in recent memory with Law & Order, and Dick Wolf managed to take his magic touch from the New York crime procedurals to Chicago to create a whole new empire. Starting with Chicago Fire in 2012, the Windy City-based franchise has expanded to include Chicago P.D. and Chicago Med most recently. Now, in case you’re looking for yet another show to have to watch to understand what’s going on whenever there’s a crossover extravaganza, NBC may have another spinoff in the works: Chicago Law.
Chicago Law would jump off from Chicago P.D. and would likely feature one of the newest characters introduced onto that show. Maureen Sebastian played an Assistant State’s Attorney in a recent episode, and it looks like NBC may have more in mind for the Revolution actress than just guest appearances.
Network executives have had early conversations with executive producer Dick Wolf revolving around the possibility of a legal drama in the same universe as Fire, P.D., and Med, according to Variety. NBC Entertainment president Jennifer Salk believes that planting the seeds for characters for Law on P.D. would be an effective way to get the spinoff off the ground.
Chicago Law is quite a ways off from possibly hitting the airwaves, and the project is only in the conceptual stages. There is no script or writer attached, let alone an order for a pilot. That said, the success of the first three installments in the Chicago franchise makes it pretty likely that NBC and Wolf would be willing to give Law a try. Even if the show were to flop, there would still be new characters to freshen up the casts of the existing series.
That’s not to say that the casts of the three current Chicago show aren’t so crowded as to approach being bloated, and keeping track of all of the characters on all three shows can be something of a chore. Still, with former juggernaut franchises such as Law & Order and CSI shrinking, Chicago expanding more and more may be exactly what procedural fans are looking for.
Of course, none of the Chicago shows can be considered formulaic procedurals. There are some similarities to the more nuanced Law & Order: SVU in that characters get plenty of emphasis as well as the plots, but there’s no reason why a Chicago Law series couldn’t be something entirely different to stand out from other procedurals and become an essential part of the Chicago roster on NBC.
We’ll have to wait and see if Dick Wolf and Co. progress beyond the conceptual stage for the Chicago Law project. In the meantime, you can catch Chicago Med on Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET, Chicago Fire on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET, and Chicago P.D. on Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET. For a look at when all of your other shows will be hitting the airwaves in 2016, check out our list of TV midseason premiere dates.
