Everything (even the best and most efficient things) still comes at a cost.
And for Chicago PD, it’s as plain as day by now that the series’s character-centric formatting is becoming a pain in the butt.
Yes, we know why they’ve had to resort to this, but it doesn’t stop us from voicing our frustrations.
For many years, we’ve had to accept that the TV industry is changing in many ways. The days of having 22 episodes of your favorite show, fewer hiatuses just for the sake of it, and fall finales dropping before the trees have even finished shedding their leaves are all gone.
Streaming has irreparably changed how broadcast television operates as it struggles to keep up. And everything costs far more than it did in the years before.
There’s also the matter of how the longer a series is on the air, the more expensive it can be, retaining cast and crew, salary hikes, and the works.
It’s evident that series we know and love have had to resort to cost-cutting measures to accommodate the budget. And many shows, especially those with larger casts, have had to rely on limiting the number of episodes for some actors and the frequency with which characters appear in installments.
The prime example of how this operates has been nearly every series in the Dick Wolf Universe. The likelihood of seeing every series regular in your standard episode of Chicago Fire or Chicago Med is slim.
FBI will often have entire episodes that seem to feature one character while another takes an episode off heavily.
And Law & Order: SVU pretty much has a revolving-door cast outside its heaviest hitters and legacy characters.
Even Grey’s Anatomy resorts to this tactic. Meredith Grey appearing in an episode is like a special treat. But it’s often buoyed by senior characters, with newer characters padding out the storylines.
Of course, Grey’s Anatomy has such a large cast that it ultimately pulls this off, because you don’t really think twice about it when three characters aren’t in an episode, Amelia Shepherd’s noticeable sabbatical aside.
Clearly, these cost-shifting and cost-cutting measures are here to stay. By now, it’s just a matter of working around them as best as possible while still telling great stories.
Chicago PD is a prime example of how a format like the character-centric process can be narratively frustrating.
Chicago PD is a fast-paced, action-oriented series. It’s also a show that rests squarely on the success and stories of an elite unit of crimefighters as they make the streets of Chicago a better place.
Voight heads the Intelligence Unit, but it has always been a very team-oriented show.
The way the group functions as a unit is vital to Intelligence’s effectiveness, and, from a more personal standpoint, Voight’s entire world being his family typically manifests as his unit being his only family.
It’s largely the show’s appeal.
But for multiple seasons now, the show has settled into this formatting that has every installment devoted to one, and sometimes two by proxy, members of Intelligence, with the other characters merely serving as background fixtures if they’re in it at all.
And, don’t get me wrong, it can result in some great episodes many times. By now, we’ve grown accustomed to this formatting, so it’s easier to appreciate the solid episodes that stem from it whenever they come.
But what’s frustrating is how Chicago PD executes its character-centric approach. Is there even a process for who they’ll feature and when? Is it a flip of the coin for who falls into which episodes outside of premieres and finales?
Remember when the close of Chicago PD Season 10 Episode 22 had Ruzek bleeding out after a child shot him, only for Chicago PD Season 11 Episode 1 to roll around and be an episode predominantly about HAILEY, not Ruzek?
We waited the entire summer for an update; the momentum for a revelation about this significant event had been building for months, and the premiere gave us only a 30-second scene that let us know he was okay before we dove into another Hailey arc.
That’s how Chicago PD’s character-centric formatting can become a hindrance for the series.
That same season, we had to wait once every blue moon for them to circle back around to Burgess to adequately address the PTSD she sustained from an abduction she experienced two seasons before.
Yes, you read that right. Chicago PD took roughly a season and a half before they even properly addressed the traumatic event Kim went through, and devoted time to exploring its effects on her. Why? Well, formatting and prioritizing other characters or storylines, of course!
The series will introduce a new, lingering “Big Bad” in one episode, and then we won’t get any forward movement or even a line referencing them for multiple episodes.
As far as the series having unsolved cases that take longer than 45 minutes to wrap up, it’s great. That aspect of a case is a solid approach and can be enjoyable when executed well. It’s the lack of breadcrumbing along the way or follow-through that can disrupt things, though.
The entire Reid arc during Chicago PD Season 12 was good, and they had a fantastic guest star with Shawn Hatosy. Still, it would’ve been so much better if they’d dug into it more instead of waiting until a Voight episode and maybe a Kim one before moving it along.
And then there are some of the current arcs. One of the reasons Chicago PD Season 13 Episode 6 didn’t work as well for me as it did for many others is that it asked us to wait four episodes since Chicago PD Season 13 Episode 2 to get a sense of how much further Torres had descended into his darkness.
It’s an arc they’ve essentially been dragging out, but only through his centrics since Chicago PD Season 12 Episode 8, resulting in Gloria’s death.
Without Benjamin Aguilar Levy’s nuanced portrayal of Torres, it’d be challenging to keep up with how much and long he’s been struggling otherwise.
And now, he has turned a corner. Still, of course, the following stages of this mysterious conspiracy arc that hour opened up likely won’t come around again or get proper teasing until the next Torres-centric, mostly because they tied such a massive plot point to a singular character with no overlap.
When that happens, we have to wait episodes at a time for any forward movement on a central plot point, and things stall. The momentum of that exciting arc? It slows down or comes to a screeching halt.
More often than not, Chicago PD is at its best when it’s all gas and no brakes. But with character-centric storytelling, we get nothing but breaks between essential narratives.
Character-centric stories lean heavily into procedural pitfalls. When the little cases don’t connect, it isn’t as gripping, and when only the same two characters are prominent in every three or four episodes, it severely undermines the team component we know and love.
It means the series has become too formulaic. We know that just about every Kim episode will also feature Ruzek and Voight. And every Voight episode this season also connects with Imani. Even this situation with Raymond Bell is used as a story arc that centers on Voight or Imani, not on anyone else.
The latter is a whole new addition to the show.
Instead of blending in and getting to interact with others, the series mostly chains her to Voight as a scene partner, which means if either one of them isn’t prominent in an episode, we miss out on a real opportunity to develop her character and actually get to know her and grow attached to her.
Kevin-centrics used to be another opportunity to dig into his dynamics with characters like Ruzek.
Now they feel so insular and far and few between, stretched out without any connecting thread to pull them together.
Without connecting threads, the narrative suffers, as do the dynamics and the team aspect.
It’s no surprise that some of the stronger episodes are anytime you can get the majority of the team together onscreen while working on an interesting case.
Character-centric formatting is clearly here to stay, and there’s no getting around that.
But compared to others, Chicago PD, with its smaller cast, still struggles to balance this format while maintaining a strong core team dynamic and keeping the momentum of its plot points.
But there has to be a way to improve to tighten and strengthen the narrative despite this formatting. There just has to be…
Let’s keep the conversation going — it’s the only way the good stuff survives.
Say something in the comments, share if you’re moved to, and keep reading. Independent voices need readers like you.
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