After 13 seasons, many TV shows would be struggling for ideas — but not Chicago Fire. The hit NBC drama is raising the stakes again, most notably with the introduction of a new captain played by Dermot Mulroney. In advance of the Chicago Fire Season 13 premiere, CBR spoke with showrunner and executive producer Andrea Newman to learn just how much chaos audiences can expect.
In the interview, Newman discussed the challenges — and positives — of introducing Mulroney after saying goodbye to Eamonn Walker in the Season 12 finale. She also revealed how seriously fans should take Jack Damon’s claim that he’s Kelly Severide’s half-brother. Plus, what will get longtime Chicago Fire fans excited about the new season?
CBR: Chicago Fire Season 12 was a tumultuous one, including your first season as sole showrunner and the departures of several cast members: Eamonn Walker, Kara Killmer, Alberto Rosende and Rome Flynn all left. With that much change, was there a desire to stabilize the show in Season 13?
Andrea Newman: [Even] with [Walker’s character] Boden not being present on the show, he’s still so present. He so formed this firehouse and formed who these people are, so he still feels like he’s there. We’ll see him this season — but coming in I think the fun is shaking things up and being able to bring in this new captain. And to have Dermot Mulroney play him is really a gift.
So we embrace the change. Here comes this new guy that is not trying to be Boden. We’re not trying to make him Boden. He’s a totally different type. We’re kind of embracing the shake-up — letting it be a bit of an earthquake around the firehouse and seeing how that affects everybody.
Speaking to Boden’s departure specifically, he made clear that he saw Christopher Herrmann as his successor, and a lot of fans were hoping to see that. So what was the thought process in creating the new character of Dom Pascal instead of relying on the character you already had?
We try to stay as true to real life as we can and and it is definitely a process to become a chief. It’s not like “I now anoint you.” Boden was saying I think you’re the man for the job, that you can do it, that you lead from the heart, which Boden believes is important. But it’s a process that he’s going through — and what’s really fun is he’s going through this process to get to that chair while there is someone sitting in that chair. We get to watch the tension that that evokes and how that affects all the characters around the firehouse, because he and Mouch are both on a journey together to move up in the ranks.
Mouch needs Herrmann to get there, because there can only be a certain number of lieutenants at the house. If Herrmann doesn’t get there, Mouch can’t move up. Everything’s kind of interconnected, and there is the new chief sitting in Boden’s old office in the meantime. So there’s a lot of fun dynamics to explore.
Are there any new or changed dynamics between Chicago Fire characters that have been particularly fun to explore?
You have your idea of how it’s going to go, and then you go to set day one, and all of a sudden you see certain dynamics happening that you you weren’t aware of and that you can really write to. What’s really fun about this Pascal character is that there are really surprising relationships with people in the firehouse. There are people that you would think that would get along and and be able to work with this new chief that can’t, that have a problem with it. And then there are alliances that form as well, where you think that’s going to be a problem… then they surprisingly jibe and become something of a team.
We’ve definitely let Dermot, who is just such a wonderful presence and actor, inform [his] character more. We had one idea of [Pascal] and then there he is, and he’s so phenomenal and brings so many elements of his own to it that we’ve gotten to evolve. It’s really fun as a writer to get to write to that, see what’s jumping off.
It’s what’s so cool about network TV, to be honest. We don’t write [ Chicago Fire episodes ] and then months later, shoot them. We write them and then we get to see them being filmed, and we get to adjust on the fly, and the next episode will be different because we saw that dynamic happen. That felt great, and now let’s explore that more. That’s the coolest thing, is that it feels live.
Another big character-related change was that in the Season 12 finale, Jack Damon claimed to be Kelly Severide’s half-brother. The firehouse has seen people lie before, including about family, like in Season 12, Episode 10 with the man who said he was Javi’s dad. So how seriously should viewers take Damon, and what’s next in that storyline?
We know that Damon has kept secrets before, so there are always going to be secrets there. And Severide and Kidd both have to get to the bottom of them. But from the jump, the problem or the issue is do we keep him in the firehouse? Do we keep him in 51? If he’s family and he kept it secret from Kidd, and now Kidd isn’t sure to trust him on any of those things. It creates lots of conflict both in the Severide-Kidd dynamic and in the firehouse.
There’s gonna be crazy in the firehouse this season, I’ll say that.
There is the continued challenge after a dozen Chicago Fire seasons of not repeating yourself, while also honoring the history that you’ve built with these characters. As someone who’s been with the show from the very beginning, how do you approach that and is your experience even more priceless now?
Absolutely. The whole learning process of it is so fun, and having been there from the beginning is a real gift for me, because we have stories this year that harken all the way back to Season 1. [They] are really cool and twisty, and I get to go back and remember, oh yeah, that guy was great and we haven’t seen him in a long time. Let’s throw a little bomb into this season by bringing this person back. It’s been wonderful to be around this long, and know these [actors] like I do and know the characters like I do.
It’s a writers’ room joke that that when we have any new writer, you’ll say a thousand times, we did that in season X — that’s inevitable. That’s going to happen. We try not to repeat ourselves, but we’re lucky with the stranger than fiction part of it all, which is that we have these real firefighters around, who are going out in the field every day. We have them in the cast. We have them as consultants. They’ll bring new stories and we’ll be like, we’ve never done that. It’s something we love, keeping it as real as possible, and because we have these firefighters around with their own experiences, we get to do that. Not always with a trillion-dollar budget, but as best we can. We get to have fun with it. It’s really lucky the stuff we get to do.
We have all sorts of cool calls and new things that the audience hasn’t seen us do before. One thing we’re really proud of is that we don’t do a lot of CGI. We have fantastic stunt people and effects people, so there’s great calls that are happening in your living room.
