Chicago PD season 6 character review: Kevin Atwater

What it means

If you’re a longtime Chicago PD fan, you’ll know that the narrative for Kevin Atwater has been the same for the last few seasons. He doesn’t get an awful lot of screen time, and when he does, it’s usually related to some kind of racial issue. As the show’s one main character of color, if it’s a race topic, Atwater gets the story.

In the episodes where Atwater wasn’t the main character, his presence was often fairly small. The only thing that stopped it from being glaring was that Trudy Platt (Amy Morton) was around even less. The show seems to have a hard time working Atwater into different kinds of stories, which is a shame, because when he does get the attention, he’s a fascinating character to watch.

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Take “Night in Chicago,” when he was vigorously calling out the murder as a bad shoot. It could’ve been an even more powerful story—but the writers had even Hank Voight (Jason Beghe) question Atwater, and then took the easier way out by having the video footage seem to justify what had happened. But it was great to see Atwater stand up and say that something wasn’t okay, even if he was the only one speaking out.

His commitment to the community, and his generally calm temperament, are a good contrast to the “succeed at all costs” attitude and short fuses of some of the other characters. But Chicago PD has to take more advantage of that and unleash the character’s full potential.