SPOILER ALERT: The following contains spoilers for Chicago Fire Season 15, Episode 1.
The Chicago Fire Season 15 premiere featured plenty of shakeups in and around Firehouse 51. In “New Blood,” the audience learned that Joe Cruz had broken his spine in the latest warehouse fire, changing not just his career but his entire life. Meanwhile, Kelly Severide took over as the new captain of 51, and a group of candidates caused early trouble in the house.
But another significant change happened behind the scenes, when Victor Teran succeeded Andrea Newman as the NBC drama’s new showrunner. He spoke to Fangirlish on what it means to be in charge of the show and how he’s approaching the season. Plus, find out what’s in store for Cruz, Severide, and others in the episodes ahead.
Brittany Frederick: This is your first season as Chicago Fire’s showrunner. What does that mean to you, and what was your overall thought on how to handle this season?
Victor Teran: It was a lot of hard work, to be honest with you. Really digging in from the moment I found out that I was going to be running the show this season. My mind was just working overtime on what we were going to do, how I was going to try to put my own stamp on it, while also honoring what the show is.
You can’t reinvent a show like this. I think that would be crazy, both from the audience’s standpoint, but also from the standpoint of this is something that really works. It’s a wonderful show. It’s a set of characters that we’ve all grown to love, and so mainly I saw my role as being as being a good steward of the world that other people created. I’m not trying to invent my own world.
You get to oversee something that Chicago Fire fans have been waiting practically the entire series for: Kelly Severide becoming the head of 51. How did you approach a storyline that anticipated?
It’s complicated because I think you’re right that in some ways, it’s a decade and a half in the making. As it got closer, and something that I think we even learned through the Pascal experience, is that the job of being a chief is not the same job as being an incredible firefighter. There’s a different set of skills involved, and it’s going to really push Severide out of his comfort zone.
Severide out of his comfort zone isn’t something we see very often. This is a guy who really commands just about any situation he’s in. He’s that annoying person that’s good at everything, but he’s not actually good at everything. [Laughs.] Maybe he could be if he applied himself, but there’s aspects of this job that he doesn’t naturally gravitate towards, or even want to do very much. And that’s going to create a lot of complications for him in this role.
He’s not the only one who experiences a change in the Season 15 premiere. The time jump means you’re able to adjust some other storylines. Is there anything else viewers should particularly be looking forward to?
We made some decisions that were facilitated by the time jump. I think one of the things that’ll stand out probably for people is having Isaiah’s mom return to Chicago so that he can live with her, and [the choice to] not pursue a kind of adoption story with Isaiah. That was something that was up in the air at the end of the season, and we weren’t quite sure how we were going to approach it.
But coming in, I felt like there was more story to tell with Severide and Kidd, that are conversations that have been left unresolved a little bit about family and children. I don’t want to overpromise on that front, but I think that that there are lingering emotions there, and they’re really complicated, and they serve as as fodder for interesting drama down the road.
The audience already knows that Joe Miñoso is leaving; his exit was reported months ago. But how did you land on this specific story of Joe Cruz being seriously injured as the how, and how much time will Chicago Fire devote to Cruz’s journey past the premiere?
That was a conscious choice, to tell a deeply emotional and hard-hitting story for him. When you even think about saying goodbye to a character like that—that itself is an extremely emotional experience. And what we decided we wanted to do is tap into that in a very real way for the actor, for us, for the family around him—the family in the production. Everyone is affected by it when you lose a family member like that, and so I think that’s really going to inform everything that happens.
This isn’t the first time that Fire has addressed a firefighter suffering a career-ending injury. We saw it with Jimmy Borrelli in Season 5, and then with Otis in Season 6. Because of how long the show has gone on, do you have to approach a major story like this with a more critical eye, to avoid repetition?
It’s very difficult sometimes. Yes, we will go down the road on a story, and then somebody will eventually say, “Oh, but we did this exact thing in season whatever,” and that happens pretty regularly because of how long our history has been.
In this case… Borelli wasn’t a character [who] became a deep part of our lore. the The character that we had our eye on was actually Otis, who also suffered a an injury that left him temporarily unable to walk. But we actually speak to it. Those two were so close; Cruz named his son after Otis. And there was something that that created a sort of poetic symmetry to that, and we leaned into it.
Realistically, how much will Chicago Fire continue to explore Cruz’s story? Obviously it’s his last storyline, and it’s important to tell as a whole, but then you have to balance that with the core of the show at Firehouse 51.
I think we plotted it well [with] balancing out what’s happening in and out of the firehouse. But we we’re not going to short shrift it, because it felt too important to skip past it, or to do it in one episode. We’re going to take our time with it, so that we really honor how important it is to both the character [of Cruz and] also to the other characters in our world. So it will have its due, and I can promise you it’ll be heartbreaking, and tears will be shed.
But it’s not all doom and gloom this season. What’s something fun about Chicago Fire Season 15, whether it’s in front of or behind the camera? What have you loved about the season so far?
I love being in the writers’ room with with my team and getting excited about ideas that we hadn’t thought of. Sometimes the coolest thing as a writer that happens, especially with a group of writers—we have this giant grid on the wall with all the characters and all the episodes, and we’re plotting things out and trying to create fun storylines that arc across multiple episodes, sometimes across the whole season. And one of the most fun parts of the job is when you see things that you didn’t intend connect up.
You’re like oh, we didn’t plan for this to to be related to this, but look at how perfectly we’ve set that up. It’s almost like we planned it from the beginning. That happens more often than you think—where by some weird cosmic kismet things line up as if we planned it going back to Season 14 or season whatever, and it’s really cool when that happens.
Chicago Fire airs Wednesdays at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on NBC. Photo Credit: Courtesy of NBC.
