5 reasons Chicago PD will regret losing Antonio Dawson
Chicago PD is going to lose Antonio Dawson at the end of this season, but here’s why the show will regret getting rid of Jon Seda’s character.
It’s the end of a Chicago PD era, because Antonio Dawson is leaving the Intelligence Unit again, and this time he’s not coming back. News has broken that Jon Seda won’t be returning for Chicago PD season 7, as the show has decided to go in a different direction.
That’s an incredibly startling decision, considering that Antonio has been one of the core members of Intelligence ever since the show premiered. Aside from his brief stint away on Chicago Justice, he’s seen it all and been part of most of it. He’s the reliable character who did everything and then some, so to drop him is a risky choice that will change Chicago PD permanently.
Beyond that, Jon Seda is one of the most popular actors in the entire One Chicago franchise; he’s the only person to have been a series regular on two different One Chicago shows, and has been one of the most frequent crossover guest stars. The idea of him not being there anymore is odd, and this is a decision that has a ripple effect through the entire fandom.
Click through this slideshow for the five reasons that Chicago PD is going to regret letting go of Antonio.
5. His tremendous experience
Antonio Dawson has been around—not just the entire One Chicago franchise, but most of the Chicago Police Department, too. It’s almost become a running joke how much experience Antonio has from working in other units, or how many connections, sources or informants he has from someplace else.
But Chicago PD leaned on that fairly regularly to move its cases of the week forward. It wasn’t at all uncommon for Antonio to have some information, or make a call to get some information, that would help Intelligence with their current investigation. It was an easy touchstone for the writers if they needed to produce a piece of evidence without a lot of screen time or a big to-do. They just had to say Antonio found it, and it made sense because Antonio could do things like that.
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Without his character, the show is going to lose some of that flexibility. Sure, the other characters have their own resources, but it’s not going to be quite as believable as Antonio’s seemingly huge network of contacts—because Antonio really had been a cop that long and was the kind of person that of course people would want to talk to and help out.
The other issue is the same thing that happened when Chicago PD killed off Alvin Olinsky: that the overall experience level on this team is continuing to go down. With Olinsky dying and now Antonio leaving (hopefully not dying), the show has removed its two most experienced detectives. The team that’s left, with the exception of Hank Voight (Jason Beghe), will be younger and less experienced. That could possibly effect how, or if, they close cases.