5 Secrets to Chicago Fire’s Success and What’s Next on the Season Finale

The Firehouse 51 team has battled all kinds of fires and disasters on Chicago Fire this season. However, it seems the producers have saved the biggest, and best, blaze for last.

"For the first time this season, Firehouse 51 is going to face a harrowing episode-long rescue call that will affect them all collectively," executive producer Danielle Gelber tells TVGuide.com of Wednesday's season finale (10/9c, NBC). "Our season finale is going to be chock-full of cliff-hangers across the board. We're going to leave everybody in some intense state of unrest."

This last rescue call marks the end of a banner first year for the NBC drama. In what was otherwise a tough TV season for the network, which canceled seven other freshman series earlier this month, Chicago Fire has slowly grown into one of NBC's surprise hits. Since its October debut, the firefighter drama has become an hour of must-Tweet TV and spawned a spin-off, Chicago PD. So how did it happen? Here are five secrets to Chicago Fire's success:

Make viewers invested: Dick Wolf's Law & Order paved the way for the modern-day television procedural, with its focus on the intriguing, twisty cases of the week, rather than the cops and lawyers working on these cases. More than 20 years later, that playbook has been tossed out. "It's very diametrically opposed to what he succeeded with in the past, but I knew that in this day and age, what people really come back for every week is the people, the characters," Gelber says. "We've tried really hard to weave the characters' emotional lives and their relationships into their daily work. They never really go on a call that doesn't somehow resonate with what's going on in their personal lives." 

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