{"id":508470,"date":"2026-03-07T03:32:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-07T03:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/508470\/"},"modified":"2026-03-07T03:32:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-07T03:32:09","slug":"one-chicago-crossover-scores-season-high-of-6-4-million-viewers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/508470\/","title":{"rendered":"‘One Chicago’ Crossover Scores Season High of 6.4 Million Viewers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe teams behind \u201cOne Chicago\u201d had another successful crossover this week \u2014 and it wasn\u2019t an easy one to produce.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cChicago Fire<\/a>,\u201d which kicked off the three-hour event on March 4, drew 6.3 million total viewers on NBC, with \u201cChicago Med<\/a>\u201d following with 6.4 million and \u201cChicago P.D.<\/a>\u201d closing out with 6.1 million. Each show hit season highs, and the best numbers the franchise has seen in over a year. They also don\u2019t include streaming viewers on Peacock.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe crossover followed a mysterious chemical attack that wiped out an airplane full of passengers, putting all of the first responders in serious danger. It also saw the return of<\/a> Jesse Lee Soffer and Tracy Spiridakos, the \u201cChicago P.D.\u201d actors who portrayed Jay Halstead and Hailey Upton, respectively, and left in 2022 and 2024.<\/p>\n

\n\tTo pull off the massive event, produced by Wolf Entertainment and Universal Television, they chartered a Boeing 737-800, filling it with 110 passengers. Each day, an FX makeup team used around 400 prosthetics on the passengers, and made 3,000 gel capsules filled with sodium bicarbonate, citric acid and red powdered Kool-Aid.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut that was just one of the hurdles.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLogistically, I think this was the toughest [we\u2019ve ever done] because, in big part, due to when we shot it. This is one of the first times we\u2019ve actually had to shut down production because it was too cold to shoot. It was insane,\u201d Rebecca McGill, EVP of Wolf Entertainment and co-ep of all \u201cOne Chicago\u201d series, tells Variety. \u201cWe were supposed to shoot at the airport for five days in a row, and we ended up shutting down two days early, because the temperatures predicted for the next day were just unbearable. And literally, they were calling it Chi-beria. It was colder than Antarctica. You couldn\u2019t be outside.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPeter Gordon\/NBC<\/p>\n

\n\tThe scheduling of the crossover is a heavy lift every year. This time, there were multiple cast members shooting different episodes of their respective shows \u2014 all over Chicago \u2014 who then had to also be on set for the crossover the same day. That, on top of losing days in production due to the weather, meant production bled into the weekends, including Super Bowl Sunday.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat was when we could get the actors for all of those big hospital scenes in the waiting room. They made a really nice day of it,\u201d McGill says. \u201cThere were the big screens\u00a0and the monitors in the exam rooms had the Super Bowl on, so it was a fun way to watch the crossover promo during the game that NBC gifted us \u2014 as we were still shooting it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe team watched the full event on Thursday, Feb. 26, and realized the episodes were short on runtime. With that, they called the writers, who reached out to the showrunners and line producers; they came up with three scenes that were shot on Friday, Feb. 27 \u2014 five days before it aired. The air traffic control scenes in the opening were filmed on Saturday, Feb. 28.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cEverybody wants to get it right \u2014\u00a0everybody wants to make it great,\u201d McGill says. \u201cSo we do what we have to do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The teams behind \u201cOne Chicago\u201d had another successful crossover this week \u2014 and it wasn\u2019t an easy one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":508471,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[30050,73323,25816,88,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-508470","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-chicago-fire","9":"tag-chicago-med","10":"tag-chicago-p-d","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/508471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}