Photo illustration by The Daily Beast/NBC
TV viewers speak of a place called Chicago, a luckless city under weekly siege three times over, teeming with tidily resolved tragedy. In NBC’s small-screen franchise consisting of Chicago Med, Chicago Fire, and Chicago P.D., procedural emperor and net-worth billionaire Dick Wolf transplants the tried-and-true formulas of his tentpole Law and Order from New York to the Midwest, and the move requires minimal adjustment. The local texture amounts to little more than writers having Googled the correct street names—one mention of a “Chicago-style pothole” raises some questions about the unique properties of potholes—but that sameness is meant to be part of the appeal.
The Chicagoverse continues to dole out the simple pleasures of its eastward predecessors, pairing the satisfying step-by-step assembly for each colorful case of the week with soapier multi-episode personal arcs for the main ensembles. Over the past decade, all three programs have remained ratings juggernauts for their familiarity, hitting their beats so faithfully that nobody has to worry about getting lost or rankled. It all goes down smooth, the closest thing we have to easy-listening television.
Though, during Wednesday night’s triple season premiere, the more apt metaphor might have been the morning paper, a leisurely way for the offline to digest the developments of the world. All the best Law and Orders fall into the ripped-from-the-headlines category, laying a thin sheen of fiction on some specific real-life scandal. The latest openers for the Chicago triumvirate go a bit broader, rendering Big Topics of the now as potboiler entertainment. Only by drawing from the ever-updating present can a man simultaneously keep so many TV shows afloat for so many years, and Wolf’s fiefdom serves as a pretty good gauge for the network notion of qualified hipness, aware of what’s modern while maintaining a safe distance from its cutting edge.