Chicago Fire

Wolf is not about to break any new ground here. He's just creating the kind of TV that people watch.

In a world without cable dramas, Chicago Fire would be considered television at its more compelling and realistic. As it is, it walks the line between shameless entertainment--hot guys, hot girls, the fires within, the fires without--and intelligent storytelling.

Rote but entertaining, Chicago Fire can't be ruled out as perhaps one of NBC's best chances for a hit.

This seems like a serviceable drama that merits a bit better ladder grade (heh-heh) for an improved second hour.

Chicago Fire a predictable but pleasantly familiar throwback that could have been on TV a decade and a half ago.

Chicago Fire gets better week-to-week, finding its own vibe, one that mixes TV-14 gore, soap opera entanglements, and working-class-hero earnestness. Sincerity puts the whole thing over.

Everyone here, including "Oz's" Eamonn Walker as the battalion chief, is working from the same medium-grim setting, with medium-grim dialogue, which quickly drags the story and action into the still-smoldering ruins of other fire-and-rescue dramas.

There are rivalries and feuds and dangerous situations, as well as a complete lack of personality. [29 Oct 2012, p.38]

There's no character you haven't seen before. More importantly, there's no character that hasn't been done much, much better elsewhere.

It's a bad omen when the show repeats one of its catastrophes next week, just amped to a grislier level. I was bored.

"Law & Order" mastermind Dick Wolf doesn't blaze any new trails with his latest effort, but at least he's getting out of the courtroom and precinct house.

There is nothing exceptional or original about the show.

One of the new season's dullest shows. [12/19 Oct 2012, p.98]

There didn't seem to be anything like [a plot] for the first two episodes, though there has been no lack of good looks, with Taylor Kinney and Jesse Spencer around and filling out their firemen togs nicely. Still there's hope. In episode three, to be exact, where we find a hint that the writers have caught on to the uses of a story line, this about a corrupt police detective.

It's not that the show is terrible--it's not--but it brings nothing new to the firefighter drama format.

It has complex and possibly interesting ideas and subplots. By the time most viewers finish, though, their flame of interest may be flickering.

Despite featuring slickly executed action sequences (though nothing viewers couldn't see on Universal's "Backdraft" ride), Fire is almost as drab as a pile of ash.

Chicago Fire isn't half bad when the fires and other crises take over as the star of the show. It's after the smoke clears and the stories kick back in that you begin to realize the only way to salvage these sorry stereotypes in uniform is to burn them the only way we know how.

The series is really good at doing exactly what you expect, which makes it surprisingly tedious for a show where lives are on the line almost nonstop.

None of them is very interesting, and it's actually kind of hard to tell them apart.

Wolf either doesn't know what to do with his characters while they're waiting around for a fire to break out, or thinks their personal stories should be the dominant element in his new series. They could be, if only those stories weren't ripped from the book of overused cliches.