The teams behind “One Chicago” had another successful crossover this week — and it wasn’t an easy one to produce.
“Chicago Fire,” which kicked off the three-hour event on March 4, drew 6.3 million total viewers on NBC, with “Chicago Med” following with 6.4 million and “Chicago P.D.” closing out with 6.1 million. Each show hit season highs, and the best numbers the franchise has seen in over a year. They also don’t include streaming viewers on Peacock.
The crossover followed a mysterious chemical attack that wiped out an airplane full of passengers, putting all of the first responders in serious danger. It also saw the return of Jesse Lee Soffer and Tracy Spiridakos, the “Chicago P.D.” actors who portrayed Jay Halstead and Hailey Upton, respectively, and left in 2022 and 2024.
To pull off the massive event, produced by Wolf Entertainment and Universal Television, they chartered a Boeing 737-800, filling it with 110 passengers. Each day, an FX makeup team used around 400 prosthetics on the passengers, and made 3,000 gel capsules filled with sodium bicarbonate, citric acid and red powdered Kool-Aid.
But that was just one of the hurdles.
“Logistically, I think this was the toughest [we’ve ever done] because, in big part, due to when we shot it. This is one of the first times we’ve actually had to shut down production because it was too cold to shoot. It was insane,” Rebecca McGill, EVP of Wolf Entertainment and co-ep of all “One Chicago” series, tells Variety. “We were supposed to shoot at the airport for five days in a row, and we ended up shutting down two days early, because the temperatures predicted for the next day were just unbearable. And literally, they were calling it Chi-beria. It was colder than Antarctica. You couldn’t be outside.”
Peter Gordon/NBC
The scheduling of the crossover is a heavy lift every year. This time, there were multiple cast members shooting different episodes of their respective shows — all over Chicago — who then had to also be on set for the crossover the same day. That, on top of losing days in production due to the weather, meant production bled into the weekends, including Super Bowl Sunday.
“That was when we could get the actors for all of those big hospital scenes in the waiting room. They made a really nice day of it,” McGill says. “There were the big screens and the monitors in the exam rooms had the Super Bowl on, so it was a fun way to watch the crossover promo during the game that NBC gifted us — as we were still shooting it.”
The team watched the full event on Thursday, Feb. 26, and realized the episodes were short on runtime. With that, they called the writers, who reached out to the showrunners and line producers; they came up with three scenes that were shot on Friday, Feb. 27 — five days before it aired. The air traffic control scenes in the opening were filmed on Saturday, Feb. 28.
“Everybody wants to get it right — everybody wants to make it great,” McGill says. “So we do what we have to do.”
Leave a Reply