It seems Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, and Chicago PD will be beginning their summer hiatus sooner than expected.
When NBC announced that it would be bringing Brilliant Minds back to finish out its remaining episodes on Wednesday, May 27, it looked like NBC was planning on having the One Chicago shows wrap their run the week prior on May 20. This timeline made sense as Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, and Chicago PD wrapped up their seasons around that same time last year; however, it seems the shows will actually be wrapping their current seasons a week earlier.
NBC has confirmed that the One Chicago shows will end their current seasons on Wednesday, May 13, beginning with the Chicago Med season 11 finale at 8/7c, followed by the Chicago Fire season 14 finale at 9/8c, and ending with the Chicago PD season 13 finale at 10/9c.
The decision to end the shows the second week of May is quite interesting, as it means that the One Chicago shows will be wrapping their seasons earlier than usual. Part of this is due to the fact that each show's episode order was reduced by an episode this season, with the current seasons of Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, and Chicago PD consisting of 21 episodes.
This will be the earliest Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, and Chicago PD have signed off the air for their annual summer breaks since 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the shows ended production earlier than expected, which led to an abrupt end to the seasons on April 15. Outside of the COVID-19 impacted seasons, we have to go all the way back to 2018 to find a year when the One Chicago shows ended their seasons before mid-May.
While it’s difficult to accept that the summer hiatus will begin a bit earlier than expected this year, this does mean that we won’t have to endure any long breaks as NBC works to stretch the episodes out. We’ll have one more week of reruns ahead before the finales, but in the next six weeks we’ll have five weeks with new episodes coming our way between April 8 and the season finales on May 13.
The good news is that Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, and Chicago PD will all be coming back next season, with NBC having already renewed the shows for their respective fifteenth, twelfth, and fourteenth seasons, which will debut in the fall. We expect that the shows will be back sometime in late September or early October, which means we will have a long summer ahead of us but we're sure the shows will serve up some amazing finales to keep us talking through the long break.