The “One Chicago” team had another successful crossover this week, but it wasn’t easy to create.
“Chicago Fire,” which opened with a three-hour event on March 4, drew a total of 6.3 million viewers on NBC, followed by “Chicago Med” with 6.4 million and “Chicago P.D.” finishing with 6.1 million. Each show hit season highs and the best numbers the series has had in over a year. It also doesn’t include Peacock’s streaming audience.
At this intersection, a mysterious chemical attack wipes out a plane full of passengers and puts all first responders in grave danger. Chicago PD actors Jesse Lee Soffer and Tracy Spiridakos, who played Jay Halstead and Hailey Upton, respectively, also returned, but left in 2022 and 2024.
To pull off this massive event, produced by Wolf Entertainment and Universal Television, they chartered a Boeing 737-800 and packed it with 110 passengers. Each day, FX’s makeup team fitted approximately 400 prosthetic limbs to passengers and created 3,000 gel capsules filled with sodium bicarbonate, citric acid, and red Kool-Aid powder.
But that was just one hurdle.
“Logistically, I think this was the toughest[ever]because it really depended on when we were shooting. This was the first time we actually had to shut down production because it was too cold to shoot. It was just insane,” Rebecca McGill, vice president of Wolf Entertainment and co-creator of the entire One Chicago series, told Variety. “We were scheduled to shoot at the airport for five days in a row, but we ended up closing two days early because the predicted temperatures for the next day were unbearable. And literally, they called it Tiberia. It was colder than Antarctica. We couldn’t go outside.”
Peter Gordon/NBC
Coordinating crossover schedules is a difficult task every year. This time, multiple cast members were filming different episodes of their respective shows around Chicago, and they also had to be on set for the crossover on the same day. So in addition to lost production days due to weather, production spilled into the weekend, which included Sunday’s Super Bowl.
“Then we were able to get the actors together for all the big hospital scenes in the waiting room, and they really had a great day,” McGill says. “We had a big screen in the exam room and the Super Bowl was on the monitor, so it was fun to watch the crossover promo that NBC gifted us during the game, even though they were still filming the game.”
The team watched the entire event on Thursday, February 26th and noticed that the episode had a short running time. So they called the writers, and the writers contacted the showrunners and line producers. They came up with three scenes that were filmed on Friday, February 27, five days before broadcast. The opening air traffic control scene was filmed on Saturday, February 28th.
“Everyone wants to do it right. Everyone wants it to be great,” McGill says. “So we do what we have to do.”
