“Chicago Fire” co-creator and former showrunner Derek Haas never imagined the show running for hundreds of episodes over more than a decade. In fact, he initially believed his firefighter procedural would be canceled after just two episodes.
“We were having so much fun making the show that nobody told us we had to worry about ratings and all of these things,” Haas told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016. “The first episode came out and it did okay. The second episode was way worse and I honestly thought we were dead in the water. We just thought, ‘Oh, okay, that was an interesting six months or year of our lives, but it was fun while it lasted.'”
6.61 million people watched the pilot of “Chicago Fire” in October 2012, while 5.85 million came back for the second episode. Overall, Season 1 went on to average 7.78 million viewers per episode. Season 2 surpassed those figures, however, reaching an average of 10.7 million viewers for each episode. Over the next decade, “Chicago Fire” improved upon its mediocre start to become one of NBC’s most-watched shows.
Chicago Fire achieved more success over time
Luckily, the plan set out by Haas and his fellow co-creator, Michael Brandt, ended up paying off. According to Haas, Season 1, Episode 7 — titled “Two Families” — was when they felt the momentum pick up.
“We knew the seventh episode was going to be a good one, it was a Thanksgiving episode and we were just thinking, ‘Man, if we can make it to the seventh, I think we’ll have caught on,'” Haas recalled. “And then lucky for us, NBC stuck with it, kept promoting it while playing it on Saturdays also. They didn’t get discouraged and let it breathe and then it found its audience. It was about halfway through the fall that we thought, ‘Oh, okay, maybe we’ve got something.'”
And they did have something: The success of “Chicago Fire” paved the way for two spin-offs — “Chicago P.D.” and “Chicago Med” — to air concurrently on NBC. All three shows are still running today, and it’s hard to imagine the franchise losing its audience any time soon.
