Chicago Fire' creator talks about renewal, spinoff possibilities

Last week NBC announced it is renewing its Wednesday night drama "Chicago Fire" for a second season. The cast and crew are still in town but not for long; they're scheduled to wrap the Season 1 finale on Saturday. They'll be back in mid-July to begin work on the new season.

Q: Congratulations on the renewal.

A: Thank you so much!

Q: The ratings were a little shaky when the show debuted in the fall, but it's become one of the most reliable performers on NBC. (9.4 million viewers in the 18-49 range.) I'm guessing you would have been surprised if they didn't order a second season.

A: You're cautiously optimistic, but I've been in Hollywood long enough to know you don't count your chickens before they're hatched.

Here's my thing: We didn't get crazy-great reviews when it started. They were middle-of-the-road reviews. And I think a lot of it was, "Oh, this doesn't have the flash or the sizzle of something high-concept." It wasn't like: All the energy went off in the world and now people with bows and arrows are going to have to fight together (the premise for "Revolution"). We didn't have the pedigree of T. Bone Burnett producing all the music for the show (as he does for ABC's "Nashville").

We saw the word "procedural" 20 times in every review, and we were like: Oh, that's not our show — just wait. We've got to introduce all these characters. It's chapters in a book, and this is just the first chapter. I think it took word-of-mouth of people telling each other, "Oh, this show is real." And since then it's been awesome.

Q: This is your first TV series. What did you and Michael learn over the past few months about what works in TV but doesn't work in film, and vice versa?

A: A movie has a beginning, middle and an end. And what we realized in TV, we don't need to have an end — we can put a new dangler in this episode that's not going to pay off for two more episodes. So for instance, we introduced a kid on a bicycle riding away from a fire scene early on in the season. We didn't even come back to him for a couple of episodes, and then the kid showed up at the station around Thanksgiving and there was some suspicion maybe that this kid was starting these fires. It was a fun running story line to be able to do — fun from a writing standpoint, over the course over four or five episodes.

Q: That's a departure from the Dick Wolf brand. All those "Law & Orders" typically exist as stand-alone episodes. Were you influenced by the fact that so many TV shows today incorporate serialized elements?

A: When we pitched the show to Dick, we had gone to Chicago for three weeks of riding-along with various fire stations in the city. And we realized, oh, there's a squad, there's a truck, there's an engine, there's paramedics, there's a battalion chief — we can make a giant ensemble in the vein of "ER" or "Hill Street Blues" rather than, "OK, there's a fire this week: Here's the response to it."

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I'll post a German translation later / Deutsche Übersetzung der wichtigsten Punkte wird noch folgen!!