CHICAGO P.D.: Gwen Sigan Teases Season 12 Will Continue to Play with the Show’s Structure

CHICAGO P.D. season 11 was the shortest run of episodes the show has had thus far (clocking in at 13 installments, due to the strike-impacted late start), but it was still a memorable year: Burgess (Marina Squerciati) and Ruzek (Patrick John Flueger) finally got engaged, the team tracked a serial killer, multiple cases came back in a major way, a blast from the past returned in an unexpected way, and Upton (Tracy Spiridakos) said farewell to the team.

“Yeah, it was a really fun season,” CHICAGO P.D. showrunner Gwen Sigan enthuses to Give Me My Remote. “It was a little bit different; because we had so few [episodes], we really wanted to make sure that they were each doing a million things.”

With the season 12 production schedule set to be back to the pre-strike normal, the writer acknowledges there are some lessons from the last season they’ll be taking into the upcoming year.

“I think we’ll definitely see the same mix of serialized storytelling but also the standalones that are evergreen that are really fun and just have a great case and a great dilemma; we’ll be doing those episodes as well,” Sigan says. “[But] another thing we learned this year is [that] we played a little more of a structure…because of the shortened timeline and because of production things—we were trying to get up so fast that you run out of time. So it was a really interesting thing to see that it worked and that we can play a little more with structure.” 

“And we can also tell smaller stories,” she continues. “I think this serial killer story was really fun for us because it was at a kind of a slow pace. And, for us, it’s not what we always do, but we all loved it. And so I think we’re just gonna keep experimenting…I’m excited. We’re gonna have a lot to do next year.”

CHICAGO P.D., Wednesdays, 10/9c, NBC

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