One Chicago Center’s first anniversary: Our 5 best stories
One Chicago Center is celebrating our one-year anniversary by revisiting our 5 best stories about Chicago Fire, Chicago PD, Chicago Med and Chicago Justice.
Happy anniversary! One Chicago Center is celebrating our first anniversary, as we launched this site a year ago this week. On Jan. 2, 2017, we became your hub for all things One Chicago.
In honor of this milestone, we’ve selected our five favorite stories from the year and are bringing them back today so you can enjoy them all over again.
Thank you to everyone who’s supported our coverage of Chicago PD, Chicago Fire, Chicago Med and Chicago Justice over the last year—we couldn’t do it without your likes, retweets, shares and above all, your clicks to this website!
Here are One Chicago Center’s 5 best stories so far:
More from One Chicago Center
- Chicago Med star on 2024 cast changes: ‘Nice to have new faces’
- Here’s the perfect Chicago Fire episode to watch on Thanksgiving
- Ranking the 8 NCIS Thanksgiving episodes from worst to best
- Mark Harmon does NOT have plans to reprise Gibbs on NCIS
- One Chicago stars tease new seasons on IG: ‘Here we come’
5) Which Indy 500 drivers One Chicago characters are rooting for (May 28, 2017)
We’re not sure anyone has ever put One Chicago and the Verizon IndyCar Series together before. We don’t think that anyone ever will again. But that’s why we loved this story; we took two things that we love and came up with a fun way to bring them together. And to have a hilarious discussion around the office.
This was a fluff piece created for the 2017 Indianapolis 500, but it turned into an incredibly fun discussion for our writing staff, trying to match all of the One Chicago characters with an IndyCar driver, without repeating any of them. We came up with some pretty funny combinations, like the idea of Matthew Casey (played by Australian Jesse Spencer) being a fan of Will Power (the Australian IndyCar champion).
4) Things that will happen in Chicago Fire’s 400th episode (February 9, 2017)
One of the things we try to do often around here is tie One Chicago into what else is happening in the world, whether it’s some crazy holiday or, in this case, what’s going on with Dick Wolf‘s other series. When Law & Order: SVU celebrated its 400th episode last spring, we couldn’t help but ask ourselves what could happen if Chicago Fire reached 400 episodes.
From Kelly Severide (Taylor Kinney) finally settling down to Christopher Herrmann (David Eigenberg) still yelling at people, this was an article that used a current milestone and everything we know about our Fire characters to create some light entertainment for our readers. Plus, who doesn’t want to think about 400 episodes of one of our favorite shows?
Watch One Chicago on fuboTV: Watch over 67 live sports and entertainment channels with a 7-day FREE trial!
3) Chicago Med: The important lesson Dr. Latham just taught us (February 9, 2017)
This is a piece near and dear to my heart, because it’s the one where I was able to use my personal experience to craft a story, and to help spread an important message. Chicago Med season 2 had a very important statement that it made about disability through the character of Dr. Isidore Latham (Ato Essandoh), and we had the opportunity to use our platform to draw more attention to it.
I hadn’t at all intended to write this article; I was working on an episode postmortem for “Cold Front” at the time. But sometimes, you just have to throw everything away and go with what’s in your heart, and that’s what makes this site so special—that we get to connect with audiences in a real way.
2) Chicago Med season 3: The compelling case of Connor Rhodes (November 30, 2017)
The prime directive of One Chicago Center is that we never want to just regurgitate information. We’re not here just to tell you what happened in an episode or what the next headline is; that’s part of it, but that’s what everyone is doing. When we founded this site, we wanted it to be more than that. Like the other FanSided sites, we wanted this to be a website where fans could come and learn, engage and hopefully grow along with us.
This Chicago Med article is an example of that mandate. We saw and admired the way that Dr. Connor Rhodes was developing this season, and what Colin Donnell has been able to do with him. We wanted to talk about character development, about what messages were being sent with the character, and about Colin’s commitment to his craft. It took several hours and a lot of listening to one Chainsmokers single, but that’s what we did.
What particularly makes this article special is the response we received from it. One Chicago fans responded to it, embraced it, and helped us prove the skeptics wrong. Thanks to you (and thanks to social media), we were able to take something we were passionate about and do something amazing with it.
1) Chicago Justice’s Peter Stone is the TV lawyer for our generation (April 17, 2017)
The number one entry on our list is by far, the most involved and most strenous article that’s ever been written here at One Chicago Center. It’s also a perfect example of what we do here and why we do it.
Our analysis of Chicago Justice main character Peter Stone wasn’t just another story about the show. It wasn’t even just a character breakdown. It was the end result of several very long and very complicated conversations about Stone’s canon, how he fit in Law & Order history, and all the things Philip Winchester had been able to do with him.
We took everything that we knew over 20 years of watching Law & Order, plus several more of watching Winchester, plus all of our time spent geeking out over TV legal dramas and applied all of it to this one article to come up with a complete dissertation on why this character, and the actor playing him, were so crucial to not only the show but to the bigger picture of TV history.
It’s bittersweet to look back on this article now after the cancellation of Chicago Justice. But it stands up as a huge accomplishment for One Chicago Center because of everything we were able to put into it. Nobody else could’ve written an article like this, and nobody else probably would’ve. But we had knowledge and experience to look at Peter Stone in a unique way, and this site gave us the platform to voice all the thoughts going through our heads.
Watch One Chicago on fuboTV: Watch over 67 live sports and entertainment channels with a 7-day FREE trial!
If you take anything away from One Chicago Center’s anniversary, it’s this: we’re not just another TV website. We love the One Chicago shows, and more than that, we love trying to do something different with them. We want to dig into them, to laugh about them, and to just speak up about them when there’s something on our minds.
We put a lot of sweat and tears into this place—and we get to do that because of you. Thanks for taking this journey along with us, and we hope that you’ve been as moved and excited by reading these stories as we have been by writing them.
Next: When is One Chicago on TV in January?
What was your favorite One Chicago Center story in the past year? Let us know which stories stood out to you in the comments below, and here’s to another year of success!