The Point Radio: CHICAGO FIRE Set To Remain Hot

CHICAGO FIRE kicks into its second season tomorrow (Tuesday) on NBC, and we talk to the cast and creators about the show’s origins, how they get fresh stories and how they’ve all changed the way they look at first responders. Plus it was a night with a boatload of sadness and a lot of surprises. Yes it was The Emmys. Better yet, we are finally getting more FIREFLY, THE POINT covers it 24/7! Take us ANYWHERE! The Point Radio App is now in the iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! Just search under “pop culture The Point”. The Point Radio – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any other mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Transcript

The Point Radio. I'm Mike Raub. Welcome to The Point. Chicago Fire back on NBC for a second season with all new authentic stories and a cast that looks at first responders in a totally different way. We'll have them explain. Plus a sad and surprising night at the Emmys

and we get some more Firefly. Let's get to The Point. This is The Point. The Point Radio. Get The Point Radio. One of the few drama successes NBC had last television season. Chicago Fire is back in prime time and still called by a lot of critics

another procedural drama. But executive producer Michael Brand disagrees with that. PBS is the number one network you know in terms of fall and winter prime time television and they live and die on the procedural and so there's something about it that seems to still connect with people and the true serialized show is so hard to

pull off for any length of time for 22 episodes of season. I mean Breaking Bad can do it 12 times once a year but as Lost and some of the other shows that started out as great serialized shows it's just hard to keep it going and so the shows that Derek and I connected to were character driven shows that were

neither procedural nor serialized and it was about the characters coming and going each week and that was ER and Hill Street Blues and and that's that's where we went so as Dick will call he says we're trying to make the platinum NBC drama and that's that's what it is it's the old school NBC drama. So where did the concept

originate? Michael's partner co-executive producer Jerry Cox. It's funny I don't think we ever in our minds thought out we're going to be or even thought of the word procedural when we were thinking of what the show would be. Brant and I flew to Chicago and we spent three weeks here just riding around in

firehouses and staying in firehouses and riding around on trucks and we found a house that had a squad it had a truck it had an engine it had a paramedics it had a battalion chief and it was such a hub of activity and the bells went off all night long and we and there were everybody was a character everybody had

stories to tell and we thought let's do this as an ensemble let's we don't need to fight a fire every week let's get 10 characters let's throw them in this pressure cooker and and I think the thing that most came across to us was this was like a second family inside the firehouse they all went home

to their wives and kids or lives for 48 hours but for 24 hours they lived together and were a family and that's where we started and so then when we came back and we talked to Dick Wolf about it we said this is what we want to do thinking well this guy basically created the procedural almost for the last 20 years at least

and would he respond to that and he said you know what I started working on hill street blues and that's what sounds like you guys are pitching and uh and so he was excited about doing it that way. Michael and Derek both explained how they worked hard to keep the show's situations authentic. Well we're we're very fortunate because we

have as technical advisors um Steve Chicharotis who's a great chief in the CFD and we have Michelle Martinez who's a you know paramedic who does these 24-hour shifts or three times a week and so we told them both at the beginning of last year just start keeping a diary you know of things that you go on and just thoughts

that you have and all of those things and they don't even need to do that because every week it's something new and crazy when the bells go off so we have not hurt at all for storylines or for action or for escapes if anything it's such an abundance of material that we have to figure out thematically how do we tie in some of these I mean really crazy

um events and response calls to what's going on storywise. We've uh we've had a mandate amongst ourselves really of writing the character stories first and the character interactions first and and we have a board in our writers room of you know 10 to 13 episodes at a time going across and 10

characters going down and we literally create a grid of what character is what their personal storylines are and that then be defined each episode and then we from there then we go forward and figure out the best emergency response or the emergency for them to respond to that will then promote that

character's growth or depth or whatever it may be so we try really hard to make it character stories first and then use the calls to help support what those stories are. Do they ever edit the scenarios? That's exactly right yeah we try to I mean we don't we don't want to tell anyone's you know particular um story of just

people out in Chicago but these firefighters I mean it really is if you just spend 24 hours in a house you will laugh and you will cry in the same 24 hours on you know these men and women just run into buildings that rats and roaches are running out of and it's so we just try to find the best stories and yeah they're mostly based on

the cast's season actress Michelle Ford. Michelle uh has been a revelation she's such a great actress and not a revelation that we didn't know she was great no she was great but you know Michelle has kind of mastered the art of playing a certain type of character you know the the tough woman and when we first met her you spend 10 seconds

with her like wow you're not at all the kind of character you play and I think we all fall into that trap of thinking actors are in real life are going to be like the kinds of characters that they play and it's just purely because of her like high cheekbones and her incredible chin she but she came on and and I remember we first met her and she's

playing you know she plays a woman in charge and she said what are you thinking about the character and we said you know we don't want you to play the tough bitch that you always play and wondering if we're going to get pushback from that she goes oh thank god I don't want to do that either and you know so and the common ground

for us and her was she's a woman who believes she's doing the right thing and you know she's been given a job to do and she thinks she's she's helping the city of Chicago by the way she goes about her business and Michelle has like we've seen a side of her as an actress that I hadn't seen a lot before in her previous working so it's been great to

watch laying out these authentic stories has made both the audience and the cast look at first responders in a whole new way series star Monica Raymond I had not considered myself going into first response before I started the show I don't have any family members who are paramedics I do have family members who are doctors

and I have a couple family members who have either served in the army or serve for parole office so that's about as close as I got to it but when I joined the show I was actually very intrigued by the entire experience of first response and I I kind of have this like insane desire to

potentially try to study to get an EMT certification at some point over the next six years I would really love to find an opportunity to do that and since I started the show obviously because I don't have any experience in the first response family or community it was a really new way of sort of seeing the world for me

and I had an opportunity to do a lot of ride-alongs before we started filming beginning season one it beginning season one and they're just the most courageous most fun and empathetic people I've I've really ever met it's humbled me since we started working on the show so where does it all

head this season yeah we're gonna we're we're starting off with the bang and the first three episodes we have I mean I feel like we're throwing everything at the audience there are four or five storylines going on a lot of conflict there's a there's an outside threat to the firehouse more than one actually

one is physical and one is mental and it's going to it's going to jump off from the teaser of the first episode of Chicago fire every Tuesday on NBC and there's always more to look at right now at NBC.com let's get a roll and here's the latest in pop culture more than the usual amount of sadness but a lot of surprises that's how it all played out

for the 65th annual Emmy Awards and chances are if you had some bets riding on with the results well more than likely you lost but seeing the faces of those who didn't expect it to win was still a good thing in a way big winners of course included the Liberace movie behind the candelabra for HBO which picked up 11 wins

and of course best drama series for Breaking Bad and best comedy series ABC's Modern Family this could be the start of what may turn out to be a really big change in the rating system Nielsen says they're going to include television viewership ratings on mobile devices when they start doing the count for their fall 2014 TV ratings now there's a couple of twists to this

first of all the new ratings will only account for videos viewed on network sites and affiliates not on ad-free sites like Netflix while everybody's talking about the Breaking Bad spin-off Matthew Weiner creator of Mad Men said when that's over it's over he told The Hollywood Reporter

there's no chance of a spin-off of the hit AMC series it's set to split its final season with seven episodes in each part in the spring of next year and another seven in 2015 he said again when it's done it's done that's the story here's a little bit of nostalgia that could be creeping back at your lives if you were a fan of Valium Comics and

their 1999 shadow man video game well it's coming back in a way GOG.com is offering it up as a classic single-player game for download to your pc for just under six bucks the game is based on the shadow man comic series from back in the acclaimed valiant days actress Paula Patton seems to be a pretty strong possibility to be

added to the cast of the Warcraft movie that's set for production early in 2014 by the way Colin Farrell's also been talked as part of the cast as well but his chances are a little less likely than Patton according to Hollywood insiders Action Lab's first new series called Skyward came out a pretty good start

at first issues sold out in stores a few days ago and now Action Lab has planned a second printing that'll be along in a few weeks Action Lab had gotten some great response from critics beforehand so the buzz was pretty strong by the time the book hit the stores and that second printing will be available to retailers at the end of

September. Good news for Brown Codes, Firefly is back in comics at Dark Horse with the new series that'll be drawn by Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator George's Genetti it'll pick up immediately after the close of the Serenity film there still will be a writer to be named for the project and it should be on the

schedule sometime early in 2014 again from Dark Horse. It ran four seasons back in the late 1990s on NBC and now it's back again it's the Pretender created by Stephen Mitchell and Craig Van Sickle who are now doing a series of novels based on the character and it's coming to comics too as well with a graphic novel and six issue

comic series that'll be written by online writer Jenna Bush the novels will be in store sometime over the next couple of weeks in the new series which again runs six issues and then will be collected into a graphic novel hardcover will be set for sometime early in the new year. This is The Point.

A little bit of chill in here as you head in the comic store this week and I hate to be so cliche but there's plenty of cool stuff waiting for you inside there. Starts out with Steve Niles Criminal Macabre there's a new series called Eyes of Frankenstein that begins this week written by Steve. Over at DC Forever Evil continues with another issue of action

comics Aquaman, Batman, Batman and Robin, Batman Superman, Batman the Dark Knight, Detective Comics, Green Lantern, Justice League, Justice League America and Wonder Woman and Superman this week. There's also a second printing of Batman Superman number two just in case you need to grab that

and a hardcover collection of those Shazam stories that were running in the back of Justice League done by Gary Frank and Jeff Lowe about a couple months back. If you want to see them all in one place and do one read well you can do that with a hardcover. It's out this week for just under 25 bucks. From IDW there Penny Press this week turns his attention to Locke & Key.

You get a Locke & Key number one for just about a dollar. Also third issue of Jupiter's Legacy out this week and as we've set a lot of attention on Saga there's a second printing of the 13th issue this week and a new one number 14 to grab. From Marvel there's a few infinity tie-ins Avengers number 20, Avengers Assemble number 19 and Nova

number eight as well as Superior Spider-Man team up number three. There's also another infinity tie-in called Infinity Heist number one and there's a second printing of Wolverine in Flesh number one as well. Finally if you're thinking ahead for things to stuff into stockings the Archie Comics one thousand page comic extravaganza is out this week.

A thousand pages for just under 15 bucks. All these and more in a comic store near you. You got to track them down though comic book locator service you can do online of course. You can also use another website which is called FindMyComicShop.com That's a wrap for right now we're back in a few days with Brooklyn

Nine-Nine the show that got so much buzz is it all too much to live up to? Talk to the cast to find out what it's like to live up to that. In the meantime plenty of pop culture for you to catch right now and get the point radio.com on your laptop or your desktop and you can listen free of course with an app that's available at the iTunes app

store on your iPhone or iPad. Check us out under pop culture and The Point, or with an android device and use the app called tune in it's free too. You can catch this podcast on great websites like ComicMix.com and michaeldavisworld.com a couple of times every week and in the iTunes podcast directory too.

Follow us under the point radio on social media like Facebook and Twitter and then be back here in a few days. you