The One Chicago series are an action-packed thrill ride centered around the first responders who save lives every day in the Windy City. As Chicago Fire maintains its chokehold as the flagship series with 13 seasons and counting, many may wonder — how much of the show is based on real life?
Series creator Dick Wolf is famed for his ripped-from-the-headlines tactics in the Law & Order writers’ room, but does Chicago Fire follow the same ideology? While Law & Order occasionally plucks details from true stories to give the detectives some fuel, the One Chicago series tends to focus on the day-to-day realities of first responders, allowing the series to get pretty creative when giving Firehouse 51 a blazing inferno to extinguish. A Chief officiating a firefighter wedding? Very realistic. Two firefighters jumping off a 4-story building to escape a blazing explosion? It’s a less likely story.
So, are any episodes of Chicago Fire based on true stories? Is Firehouse 51 an actual firehouse that fans could visit? Let’s take a look inside the facts and fiction of Chicago Fire.
Is Chicago Fire based on real life?
Simply put, no.
While the action-packed nature of a thriller like Chicago Fire prevents episodes from being based on actual rescue calls, the series pays homage to real-life Windy City firefighters in several ways.
Dushone Roman — Californian firefighter and star of Wolf’s nonfiction series L.A. Fire & Rescue — weighed in on how Chicago Fire mirrors reality and which details veer toward fiction. When considering which details of Chicago Fire are the most realistic to his daily grind, Roman told TV Insider that the show’s workplace relationships between calls are deeply relatable.
“I love the back-and-forth banter. That’s exactly what we do in the fire services. Watching Chicago Fire brings back memories of what we do,” Roman explained. “They get things right for the most part, but in the medical scenes, there’s funny EMS stuff, say, where oxygen on people’s face are placed on wrong.”
Aside from being directly inspired by the first responders of the Chicago Fire Department, Chicago Fire has also worked with local firefighter unions to include actual firefighters as extras in rescue scenes. One of those extras turned his Chicago Fire guest appearance into a bona fide role on the show — fan favorite Anthony Ferraris.
