(This was posted on the Chicago Tribune site on May 2, 2013. Chicago PD has been made official.)
Q: What can you tell me about the possible police-themed spin-off that you're testing out in an episode of "Chicago Fire" (airing in two weeks)?
A: Last fall, when we first introduced two cops on the show, Dick Wolf — half with a smile on his face — said, "You know, we could do a cop show!" And Dick's a great writer himself, so he was already talking to the network: What if we did this? What if we did that? And I think as they picked shows for pilot season, they realized, "Oh, we don't have something like 'Chicago Fire' this year," and I think they called Dick back and said, "So what would that cop show look like?"
We already had a story line in the 23rd episode we knew would involve the police, so all that was involved was making that bigger. It's not the finale, by the way, which is what everybody's reporting. All this happens in the penultimate episode.
Q: With the exception of "Southland," which probably isn't coming back, you don't see those kinds of workaday cop shows anymore.
A: Exactly. The cop shows have been like, "Here's the detective who can always tell when you're lying!" or "This is the unit that only tracks down serial killers!" Our thing was, Matt, Michael and I spent four days riding around with cops and detectives and we got to see the inner workings of the police department, and it was like, why isn't this a show? The same way that we did it with the fire department, there's a show in what it means to be a policeman in Chicago. So that's what we're going for.
I will say that the "Chicago Fire" experience helped us in telling the network, "You can do a show like this." Because I think if we had just come in and said we wanted to do a police show in Chicago, they would have said, "What's the hook?" That's the big expression. But we were like: No, it's going to be day-in-the-life of Chicago policemen.
If we do this right, as Dick Wolf said, it'll be like Dickens' London, where we can have a character appear on both shows. There's a way to do it where these characters just intertwine. And the only way to do that is both shows shooting in Chicago, shooting close by, having the same people in charge.
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SOURCE: Chicago Tribune / Nina Metz
