Latest Chicago Fire Update Leaves Fans Rattled with Shortened Season 12 News

Summary

• After nearly four months, SAG-AFTRA announced the end of the strike, following the lead of the WGA.
• Work on the series is already in full swing, but the studios and networks need to meet the deadline for the broadcast season.
• To do that, they are willing to cut back on the number of episodes. That applies to Chicago Fire

When the WGA announced on September 27 that it had negotiated a new contract with the AMPTP, the entire entertainment industry breathed a sigh of relief. We all thought that the two Hollywood strikes would end at about the same time and that the actors would follow the writers with a new contract. But only SAG-AFTRA was not satisfied with the terms offered by the studios, and negotiations dragged on for another 7 weeks.

But today, November 9, SAG-AFTRA has announced that it has reached a tentative agreement with the AMPTP. Now the companies can fully resume work and begin shooting in the coming months.

This is also the case for NBC's popular One Chicago franchise, including arguably its most popular show, Chicago Fire. The news is undoubtedly encouraging, but not all is smooth sailing: the terms of the shows will likely result in shorter seasons, which has Chicago Fire fans incredibly worried.

What We Know So Far

First and foremost, Kelly Severide actor Taylor Kinney will be back for Season 12! In January of this year, it was announced that the actor would be leaving the show indefinitely due to personal reasons, so his character left Chicago for an arson investigation training program. Only his wife Stella Kidd discovered that the program had ended and he still hadn't shown up.

But, speaking of production, Chicago Fire's permanent showrunner Derek Haas left the project after 11 seasons. He was replaced by co-showrunner, executive producer and writer Andrea Newman. How this will affect the show is hard to say at this point. We will have to stick around and find out.

A Shortened New Season

To meet the deadline of releasing scripted series for the fall season (that is, at least by May), the studios must speed up their work. How do they do that? By reducing the number of episodes per season. According to Deadline, most studios have decided to cut their shows down to 10-13 episodes. One Chicago has opted for 13. This has only happened to Chicago Fire once before, in 2020, when Season 9 was cut to 16 episodes due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Naturally, this made fans incredibly cautious. Considering the number of Chicago Fire characters and stories they have to tell in the upcoming season, the writers may simply not be able to do it in such a short amount of time and on such a crushing scale. Many viewers have expressed a willingness to wait until the fall of 2024 as long as the season is complete. But it's unlikely that the profit-driven NBC would agree to that.

Originally, when the writers' strike ended on September 27, the networks and the studios that supply them were counting on a seamless transition – that the SAG-AFTRA strike would end within a month of the WGA walkout, allowing shows to go into production as soon as enough scripts were written to kick off filming. For well-oiled machines like the Wolf series, I've heard that window was about five weeks of a writers room, so they could have started production next week if an actors agreement had been reached earlier.

Possible Release Date

Although work on the script has probably already begun, it takes about 3-6 weeks of preparation and pre-production before shooting can begin. So we should expect the new season by the end of November at the earliest, although early December sounds much more realistic. If production starts in this period, we can expect the 13-episode season to be released in April-May, in time for the broadcast season.

But everything will depend on the decision of the executives, while we should not rule out the possibility of postponement to next fall. So all we can do is wait for the announcements. But they will probably come very soon.