As 2024 draws to a close, Chicago Fire fans have something more to celebrate as NBC’s original One Chicago drama has ended the year as NBC’s most-watched original series of the year!
That’s right, Chicago Fire might be in its thirteenth season but the hit series shows no signs of slowing down in locking down the top spot when it comes to viewership thus far this season when it comes to non-sports programming aka Sunday Night Football.
Season-to-date, Chicago Fire is averaging 7.8 million total viewers making it NBC’s top-rated non-sports program as well as the fourth most-watched drama on all of broadcast TV. While the show’s total viewership is down just a tad from last season – 8% to be exact - the fact that Chicago Fire remains the most-watched original series on NBC is a major victory for a show that is getting up there in seasons – a time when ratings tend to start falling off for many shows.
And it’s not just Chicago Fire that continues to perform well for NBC. Chicago Med and Chicago PD round out the Top 3 most-watched non-sports programs on NBC with Chicago Med season 10 averaging 7.4 million total viewers and Chicago PD season 12 averaging 6.9 million total viewers. As TVLine points out, this is the smallest audience gap for Chicago Med and Chicago Fire in four years, with Med really seeming to hit a stride in season 10.
In addition to leading the charge at NBC, all three One Chicago shows also landed within the Top 10 most-watched and top-rated dramas of the season which is an amazing feat for a trio of long-running series.
Needless to say, the numbers the One Chicago shows continue to pull in, and the shows securing the status as NBC’s three most-watched non-sports programs of the season bode particularly well for their renewal odds heading into 2025. While we don’t know when NBC will start making decisions about its current lineup, we don’t see a world in which Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, and Chicago PD aren’t renewed for another season.
The numbers clearly speak for themselves as all three shows remain incredibly successful for the network and we imagine they’ll soon be enjoying some season-high ratings when the crossover event airs this January. Given we also know that Wolf Entertainment is one of the most cost-efficient studios in the industry, there is simply no way NBC opts not to renew the One Chicago shows.
What we’re more interested to see is whether NBC might decide to bet big on the shows with a multi-season renewal or go with a more standard single-season renewal. We’ve seen the network take both approaches with the shows, so there’s no telling what the plan might be for renewing the shows but what we know is that with ratings as good as these we’re not worried at all about the One Chicago franchise’s future at NBC.