The thing about being out of work and having your ability to walk compromised is that you have to fill your time somehow. Another thing is that you need something good enough to keep you occupied, but nothing that takes much brainpower to watch. For me, that ended up being “Chicago Fire” on NBC. I caught a good chunk of episodes while I was in the hospital, but when I got back to my parents’ house, I went all in and watched starting from season one. In the process, I got my mom sucked into the goings-on in Firehouse 51.The show has had a million things go on, but the basic premise is this: “Chicago Fire” focuses on the members of Firehouse 51 in the Chicago Fire Department. The firefighters battle fires as well as each other and the higher-ups in the CFD. Through it all, they remain dedicated to their jobs and to each other.
When I first started watching the show, I was surprised at what it was. I knew it was a popular show and one of the many Dick Wolf-produced shows (all the Law & Order shows), but I didn’t know much about it. I figured it was a typical procedural like “Law & Order”, but with firefighters. It’s more of a soap opera, with a few fires to fight each week. The soap-opera elements surprised me most. And I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised. With cop shows, it is easy to have a case for them to solve each week, but for firefighters, it is different. Most of the time, there's no case to solve or bad guy to catch; their job is saving people from burning buildings. They don’t spend their days poring over case files and connecting clues; they spend it waiting for the alarm to go off. That's why I got sucked in. In the handful of episodes I watched, I became invested in these characters and their relationships. It is really easy to like these characters, and a lot of that has to do with what they do: they are good at it, and they care about it. These are all fundamentally good, hyper-competent people.The show's soap-opera nature is both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, for the show to be interesting, the characters you love have to struggle, have ups and downs, and fight some battles. These two characters who have a “will they, won’t they” thing are finally going to get together; someone has a close call and has to reckon with being that close to death; someone thinks they have to go through some trauma alone, only to find that their 51 family is there for them when they need it most. On the other hand, some storylines verge on overly dramatic, and some characters are cartoonishly villainous. One of the most common hardships the characters face is someone with a vendetta against someone in Firehouse 51. They break up the crews of Squad, Truck, and Engine and send them to different firehouses, or they use Firehouse 51 as an example by giving it extra scrutiny. It gets eye-rollingly bad at times. You know they'll be okay in the end, and that no matter what happens, the members of Firehouse 51 will be back together because, despite being about people who take huge risks, the show isn’t going to be taking any.
The show is currently in its 15th season, and since I had all that time off, I watched most of it before I returned to Buffalo full-time in February. Since I was mainlining the show (I was getting through a season in a week- maybe a season and a half), I saw all the patterns, clichés, and cycles the show has gone through in its over a decade-long run. Sure, the storytelling was bad at times, but every long-running show has the same issue (especially when it runs 22-24 episodes). The show does overcome some overly dramatic storylines and remains entertaining. Much of the original cast has moved on, but they have done a good job of introducing compelling new characters over the years to fill those vacancies. Characters from the other two “Chicago” shows, “Chicago PD” and “Chicago Med,” make appearances on “Fire,” and vice versa. At least once a season, they do big “One Chicago” crossover episodes where one story spans the three shows and involves everyone on every show (those are the only episodes of “Med” or “PD” I watch).I tend not to watch procedurals, and people don't talk about them much unless they are unique in some way (I plan to talk about one of those in a few weeks). Unless there is a noteworthy storyline, shows like these tend to just be there on your TV every week and don’t warrant analysis, and while I wouldn’t say “Chicago Fire” rises to that level, its character-driven storytelling makes it one of the more compelling procedurals on TV.