“The aim here is, every week, if you watch the show, you will get at least one piece of medical information that you probably don’t know,” said producer Dick Wolf at a recent press conference to discuss his new series, “Chicago Med,” premiering Tuesday. The third entry in NBC’s successful “Chicago” franchise (with “Chicago Fire” and “Chicago PD”), the new series will follow Wolf’s formula of “ripped from the headlines”-style drama — mixed in with personal drama, of course.
Some of the cast, including Oliver Platt, as well as the show’s trauma center setting, were introduced in an episode of “Chicago Fire” last season.
Platt plays psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Charles. Chief of psychiatry at the trauma center, Dr. Charles is introduced to us as a man who, while an expert in his field, may not be as successful in navigating his own life.
“The etymology of the word ‘psychiatry’ was actually coined by a German doctor in the early 19th century,” Platt said, “and psychiatry actually means the medical treatment of the soul. I would say that Dr. Charles is probably a guy whose own soul — I think that he probably distracts himself from his own problems with the problems of other people.”
Lending to the show’s realism is the fact that some of the cast, including Platt, worked with real doctors to further understand the situations their characters would find themselves in.
“I’ve been hanging out with the really great people at Columbia, in New York,” Platt said. “New York State Psychiatric Institute, Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman and his staff have been very generous with their time. I’ve learned a lot about the day-to-day life of both the chairman of psychiatry of a large hospital and emergency room psychiatrists, psychiatrists who work in in-patient wards. Fascinating stuff.
“The truth is,” Platt continued, “is that a significant portion of the people who walk into emergency rooms are actually psychiatric patients. We don’t necessarily know that they are. Because there’s no blood test for anxiety or schizophrenia, the diagnostic process is a much more mysterious art. That’s where it gets really interesting. I think that there is a movement and an awareness that the public mental health apparatus needs to be more aggressive about finding ways to go out into the community and let the people who suffer from these illnesses know that help is there, instead of letting them suffer in silence.”
The characters of “Chicago Med” will not only deal with such problems in their own series, but they will also be part of the successful “Chicago” series crossovers that have become audience favorites.
“The crossovers are incredible ratings engines for us,” Wolf said. “[But] what we can’t do is have them become commonplace. So we basically have an agreement we’re going to do three this season.”
And in February, look for what executive producer Matt Olmstead calls a “jumbo crossover” — a four-way collaboration of the three “Chicago” series with “Law & Order: SVU.”