CHICAGO P.D.: Gwen Sigan Previews Upton’s Premiere Struggles

On the Wednesday, January 17 season premiere of CHICAGO P.D., “Unpacking,” the brass has an important assignment for the police department: They have to shadow 13 new pilot programs. For Upton (Tracy Spiridakos), she ends up working with a crisis prevention team on a perilous call.

But will these pilot programs play out in the series beyond the premiere? “Ideally, I hope it will continue playing, as far as exploring different facets and different things that are going on in Chicago,” showrunner Gwen Sigan tells Give Me My Remote. “We want to explore, thematically, this year, new possibilities for our characters. So it felt right that [the season kicks off] with the possibility that’s happening in a lot of different police departments. That’s kind of what inspired that little unit that you see—[it] is based off of a lot of crisis intervention teams that are working now.”

Unfortunately for Upton, she’s not in the best of places when she goes on her temporary assignment. “I think the interesting thing about this episode is we find her six months out and she’s had to make a lot of decisions to sort of move forward and progress in her life,” Sigan previews. “What we see is that maybe some of those decisions have been on autopilot; that she’s known she needed to make them. But we get to see by the end of it where her head’s actually at. And how she’s actually feeling about things.”

“This case really mirrors that, in a lot of ways, because it shows that her own personal struggles are affecting the job,” she continues. “Like a lot of us, we bring home into the job sometimes. We see that that is not something you can really do when you’re a police officer—and how that affects everything.”

And while Sigan previously shared that Spiridakos will now be sticking around for all of season 11, she was more coy about how Halstead (Jesse Lee Soffer) might factor into Upton’s ultimate exit.

“I think we played so much into it last season that now it’s really getting closure on that so that she can move forward,” Sigan says. “And get to a place…this season we don’t want to focus on the pain of that fallout as much as we want to focus on what comes next.”

CHICAGO P.D., Season Premiere, Wednesday, January 17, 10/9c, NBC

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