No one is as passionate and excited about what’s in store for Chicago PD Season 12 as showrunner Gwen Sigan.
TV Fanatic had the pleasure of hopping on Zoom to speak with her about what’s upcoming for a season.
Season 12 feels much like a soft reboot for Chicago PD, and she couldn’t wait to share so many details about what the series will do next this season.
Sigan’s passion for the subject matter was palpable as she tried to cover everything from the new additions to the cast to fresh storylines for fan favorites.
Please check out our interview below and share your thoughts!
How Chicago PD Intends to Keep Things Fresh After 11 Seasons
So, this season is sounding like a soft reboot. What has been your strategy to keep things fresh after 11 seasons?
Yeah, I mean, it’s fun, right? You’re 11 seasons in and thinking, “What else can we do?”
We quickly realized in the room that there were still so many sides to our characters that we hadn’t gotten to explore. And that is where we ended up leaning into.
This year, our season theme is a crisis of self and identity. So we’re looking at who these people are and what sides of them they have not explored.
What sides of them have been dormant for a while? Or what could really surprise them? Who could come into their life and surprise them?
Or what could we see happen that triggers a different form of transformation for them? It’s been fun to write with that desire to surprise yourself and the challenge of “What we haven’t done?”
What would be interesting, and what could surprise our actors? You know? It’s been an exciting way to look at it. And it helps that we have all these new characters coming in.
You get to see these different dynamics and relationships form. It’s taken everything in different directions, which has been really nice.
Newcomer Kiana is a Breath of Fresh Air Chicago PD Hasn’t Seen Before
Yeah. Of course, you’re reintroducing Patrol, which everyone will probably be excited about. So, we have Kiana, but will she have partners? Usually, there’s a partner component to that.
Yeah, yeah.
Does that mean more Trudy time if there’s more Patrol? How will it work?
Right. It’s interesting. You’ll see how we play Kiana’s story. She comes in as a patrol officer but doesn’t stay a patrol officer forever.
We’ll get to see a little bit of a ride with her. But when we meet her, yeah, she is a patrol officer. Her background is in Patrol, and she’s been in it for about three years. But she also has tactical experience.
She worked on a Tactical team, and her background and experience are a big asset to us. She’s also very active — an active police officer.
She likes to be first on the scene, boots on the ground, and the first through the door.
I think it’s exciting for her to see the intelligence unit, see how we work, and almost fall in love with it and that side of policing, which is much more long-form. You’re in it for a while, and you kind of get to stick around and see how everything falls out.
So, we’ll get to go on that journey with her and see her really fall in love with this whole different side of what it means to be a police officer.
Shawn Hatosy’s Addition Peels Back Layers to a Notoriously Enigmatic Voight
That all sounds exciting!
Yeah! Thanks.
The casting, of course, is incredible. You guys have the Shawn Hatosy this season.
YES, yes!
That’s huge! So tell me, how did you land him? The man is always booked and busy. What can we anticipate with his character?
We’re very grateful he said yes. He was our first choice, and, amazingly, he agreed to do it. He’s just such a good actor, man. He’s so versatile, which is what we were looking for.
He’s playing somebody that is kind of a version of Voight. That’s almost what we were thinking of him as.
You’ll get to see different sides of him throughout the season. But this guy is coming in as a bit of a cipher. We don’t know a lot about him, and that’s rare for Voight.
Usually, Voight can go through his little back channels to get a lot of information. But this guy, he isn’t that.
He’s coming into the police force as deputy chief of OCD, so he’s Voight’s boss. We’ll see pretty quickly that he shares a lot of the same police philosophy as Voight.
He likes to be with his unit on the streets, to know what’s going on, and to provide resources for his officers. And, of course, he’s also a person. [Laughs]
He has a complicated backstory. As we get to know him more, we will see where he varies from Voight and where he is the same as Voight.
It’s a great way to examine Voight’s identity in the context of his new relationship with Reid.
We’ll also get that with Chapman this season, too.
Yup!
It sounds like Voight will be burning his team out.
Yes! [Laughs]
Can you talk a bit about that Voight/Chapman dynamic and how it comes into play?
Yeah. We love Sara [Bues], who plays Chapman. She’s such a great actress.
She and Jason have this great chemistry together. And I think she really represents another adult — a genuine peer, like another person in the room with him who he doesn’t oversee. He’s not her boss, so it allows for a different dynamic.
It allows her to be really honest and very upfront with him. She talks to him very straight, which is nice. I think that’s what he respects about her: that she will call him out.
She will tell him, “You need to slow down. You are burning out your team.” They have a really nice kinship.
We’ll see it deepen throughout the season, and that relationship will transform a bit. Again, that’s another way we’ve gotten to explore Voight, who he is, and why he is the way he is.
You know, like there’s a certain — he likes that most of his relationships are with the people in his unit, and he’s their boss. It’s a boundary. But for Chapman, she reminds him, “That’s not me.”
On Chicago PD Honoring Hailey Upton While Turning a Fresh Page
How difficult has it been honoring past fan favorites with Hailey and Halstead gone while also bringing in and creating new potential fan favorites?
It’s so interesting when characters leave the show because you obviously want to honor them as best you can.
However, I don’t think you can ever fully make the audience because none of us want them to leave. We want them to stay on the show forever.
In my dreams, they just keep coming back. But you have to find a way that feels right and also sustains the show and keeps it going, you know?
I’m really proud of what we were able to do with Tracy’s character. She left in a very hopeful way, which allows us to look at it in an almost positive light.
She left, but I love to believe these characters are still in touch. We don’t see it on screen, but Burgess and Ruzek are calling her. Atwater’s calling her and checking in.
She’s still there and a part of their lives, which helps because it allows us as storytellers to just be like, “How do we have fun with it now? How can we get new people in here who can be something different and shake up the people that we already have there?”
So that’s how we’ve been trying to look at it because, you know, we love her, and it’s a big loss for us.
Burzek Are Strong Together and Independently from Each Other and Face Different Family Dynamics
We have the big Burzek wedding everyone’s probably excited about. But what other storylines, personal and professional, can you tease for Ruzek, Burgess, Atwater, and Torres?
There are so many interesting things going on. With Burgess and Ruzek, we really wanted to look at things like, “Okay, we know they’re a unit together, right?”
They’re in a good place in their relationship, moving towards this exciting wedding and being almost like a married couple.
How do we allow them both to have these rich, independent lives but keep it so they can be each other’s rock and foundation anytime something comes up?
We’ll get to see them as a unit and a family, especially with Makayla and all that.
But we also see that a lot is going on in their lives independently.
We’ll see for Burgess; a lot is going on in her life at work, with her ambition and keeping it all together, figuring out what kind of police officer she wants to be, and being tested in different ways.
Episode 2 is incredibly Ruzek-heavy, and something happens that really shakes him up and surprises him. We get to see how he deals with that and then what it leaves behind.
We also see some of his different family dynamics and family members, the things that can happen in their lives that happen in all of our lives, and how they come back together.
Atwater’s Personal Growth May Lead to Love
And then Atwater’s got a great one.
Episode three is an Atwater episode.
Last season, we really articulated a lot emotionally about what’s been going on with Atwater and that he’s been raised to need to be a provider, a caregiver, and incredibly responsible. But there’s a certain level of burnout and mental fatigue.
We articulated that, but we never gave him a solution.
This season, he’s going to be looking for a solution, and we’re sort of playing out that story through a new character that he meets and has a really fun relationship with a love interest that we see.
It has him looking at a slightly different perspective and wondering if there’s a way to have it all and maybe live life a little differently.
And so, yeah, it’s been really fun, and that’s a good one and a new dynamic for him.
Chicago PD returns with all-new episodes on Wednesday, September 25, at 10/9c on NBC.
You can stream the show on Peacock.
