Photo Credit: Elizabeth Morris/NBC
For weeks now, people have been buzzing about the big Law & Order SVU/Chicago Fire/Chicago PD 3-show crossover. Well, the wait is finally is over with the first part beginning with Chicago Fire tonight. There’s been lots of speculation surrounding the event with questions about what to expect and fortunately, we were able to participate in a conference call with Law & Order: SVU Executive Producer Warren Leight and Chicago Fire/Chicago PD Executive Producer Matt Olmstead to get all the deets, and with what we’ve learned, trust me when I say you’ve going to love it.
One of the difficulties with crossovers is you have separate shows with completely different writing teams, and issues often arise about which team writes for what show. Should a writing team be allowed to caliberate only on their own show? If they write for any of the other shows, should it be only for the characters on their show.”
WARREN: “Each show’s team wrote each show’s episode, but Matt and I were on the phone a lot in the initial planning stages. One of our writers, Ed Zuckerman, who is a teleplay writer of the SVU part of the crossover went out to LA for a few days. There’s back and forth. Showrunners are all about control. It’s very scary for a showrunner to let somebody else write their characters’ lines, so we checked in with each other. If there was something that I felt was a little bit wrong for one of our characters in the PD part, I politely made my opinions known and vice versa.”
MATT: “Yes and we had a brief run through last season when we were able to get some of the SVU actors over to Chicago PD for a little crossover, just kind of a one-way crossover, I guess. And the same thing. It was actually pretty exhilarating to be able to kind of write for new characters. And so we wrote for the Fin character and the Rollins character and of course we sent the script to Warren to check out and that he would know the characters better than we would. So yes, there was a kind of a respectful checking, vetting, I guess, of both material. And I could say that when I read the SVU script of our characters, it sounded very true and there really wasn’t any notes. It came across pretty sharp.”
I absolutely love crossovers, but honestly, at times they can be somewhat disappointing. How many times have you watched something that claimed to be a crossover, only to find out your favorite show got 2 minutes of airtime, and the other show got the rest? Yep, you know what I’m talking about, and it happens all the time. Well, you will be glad to know that this crossover isn’t like that at all.
WARREN: “We’ve participated in disappointing crossovers where there is just one scene, and we’ve been guilty of that. But this one is so much not like that to where it’s made production difficult. We had Kelli, Danny, and Mariska in Chicago for 4 days, 4 days, and 2 days, and we had Halstead, Lindsey and Voight here, 2 days for Lindsey and 4 days for Halstead. I think this is a lot less of a cheap tawdry gimmick than is normally the case.”
MATT: “Yes, absolutely. In last season in the crossover we were referring to, we had a substantial amount of time with Fin and the Rollins character. We had our Lindsey appear in one scene at the end of SVU the prior hour which some may have interpreted as a crossover. But we didn’t want to sell it that way since it wasn’t a true crossover. But with this one the characters are completely ingrained in the storytelling throughout the whole hour. ”
But that doesn’t mean it was easy. In fact, creating a full-blown, true crossover can be tedious and quite difficult.
MATT: ” Dick Wolf laid out a version of what he was envisioning of what the bouncing ball would be, essentially. You can spend a lot of time on meetings and follow-up meetings and logistics and trying to chart this whole thing. I think what Warren and I both did was, ‘Let’s just jump in.’ I know what I’m going to hand off to him at the end of Chicago Fire, and he’s telling me what he’s going to hand back over to me from SVU. ‘Let’s just get some drafts in, and then, we can begin to fine-tune and figure out the logistics from there.'”
WARREN: “It’s fun for the actors to act with each other, and they always come back refreshed. We have a smaller squad than Matt’s team does. We have only four detectives, and so at first, we had to grapple with extra bodies in our squad room and which ones go where. Just a few more pieces on the board. Always when we’re writing for actors this good, you don’t want them to be in a three-page scene and just have one line. It’s sort of family hold-back in a way. You want to make sure everybody gets something.”
Another difficulty with writing a crossover is you might have different audiences for each of the shows. You don’t want to focus too much on one show and run the risk of alienating the viewers of the other.
WARREN: “In the Dick Wolf universe at the end of the day each episode has to standalone and yet link to the one – in my case the one before and the one after. They have to link. So that is a particular challenge and you want to make sure you don’t want to have at the beginning of SVU a three minute previously on Chicago Fire. You want that to be as short and clear as possible. But it is part of the challenge of these things is to make sure that our episode is self-sufficient as a standalone yet the baton passes and there are enough unresolved parts to allow PD to get another hour out of it.”
“One good thing that we have I think is our episode goes right into PD. So presumably people will stay with it, one hopes. And that it is good that they are on the same night and not separated by two or three days. Our hope is that the audience that night comes in and stays for both hours and that we have made it compelling enough for them to do that.”
In some of the previews, we’ve seen some potential heated interactions between Voight and Benson. Should we expect some fireworks between the two in the crossover, and if so, good or bad fireworks?
Photo Credit: Elizabeth Morris/NBC
WARREN: “You know, it was fine when they were in New York, Matt.”
MATT: “And it went to shit in Chicago, didn’t it? [Laughs]”
WARREN: “There’s two kinds of fireworks we could mean here. They have two very different approaches to interrogation. The two shows have different approaches to police procedure. I think we all know Voight can be a little more physical, and Olivia is, in general, a more empathic detective. There are two different schools of how you work an interrogation, and those kinds of fireworks take place in both episodes.”
“I think they’re among the most fun scenes in both PD and SVU. Then, the question is, at the end of the day, at the end of a case, do these two probably have more in common than any of the other people in their squad room? What did you think of that, Matt?”
MATT: “I totally agree. The chemistry and dynamic of two characters in both shows was reinforced by how the two actors felt about each other. In terms of Voight, he rolls over most people. There aren’t a lot of people who can go toe to toe with him, and so here comes this equal whom he respects, is formidable, he knows he can’t run a game on her, and even though they have different policing styles, there’s a mutual respect.”
“They do lock horns.And they do so equally but then when it is over it is over. But then in the PD side of it when the Benson character shows up for the first time and in the midst of a pretty grim investigation with grim details, Voight sees her with a smile on his face. He is happy to see here. Because there is this immediate chemistry,immediate kind of shared affection between two very similar characters. Ironically, though, they may have different backgrounds and different approaches to it. And then when they have their kind of private moment in the episode on PD. What is funny is that there was a point when I was talking to Jason, he was asking about whether Voight ever going to have a love interest. I said,I don’t know. I mean we have always portrayed that he has done some dirty stuff. He has one true love which is his wife who is no longer in his life but that was it, and he has become married to the job.”
It all begins tomorrow night with Chicago Fire. In this episode, Members of Firehouse 51 are forced to contend with a house fire, but when the injured owner is rescued from his cellar clutching a suspicious box, Lt. Severide (Taylor Kinney) brings in Sergeant Voight (guest star Jason Beghe, Chicago P.D.) and Detective Lindsay (guest star Sophia Bush, Chicago P.D.) into the mix for further investigating. Elsewhere, Mills (Charlie Barnett) wonders if the dangers of Newhouses’s (guest star Edwin Hodge) off-duty gig are worth the cash returns, while Molly’s II is in dire need of a good chef.
Episode 3.07 of Chicago Fire is titled “Nobody Touches Anything” and airs tonight at 10/9c on NBC.
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All photos courtesy of Elizabeth Morris and NBC
