Some spoilers are in this article if you haven't caught the Chicago Med Season 3 premiere, yet.
If you watched tonight's episode of Chicago Med "Speak Your Truth" you may have noticed the show picked up right at the events of the explosive Season 2 finale, when Dr. Daniel Charles got shot by one of his patients. However, Med didn't linger on that moment for long, and instead quickly time-hopped to a few months later, when Dr. Daniel Charles had gotten over the physical ramifications of his injury, but was still dealing with the physical ones. It was a curious choice, especially when it seems there could have been so much story to be mined from the physical injury, so when we caught executive producers Andrew Schneider and Diane Frolic at One Chicago Day, we asked why Chicago Med dealt with that major timehop. According to Schneider,
Sure did [make it more complicated], because when we were originally going into this season we were going to have the first episode be the same night as he was shot. Then we learned, 'No, you're on three months later and you need to be in sync with the other shows.' So, we had to adjust it to be three months after... But that took some retooling and some rethinking about how storylines changed.
If you've kept tabs on Chicago Med, you may already know that the series was planned to air at the same time as its sister shows Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D. this year. As has been known to happen with television, that plan changed and Chicago Med was held for a November premiere while Fire and P.D. premiered earlier in the fall. In order to stay on the same timeline, the entire plan for the first part of the season had to change, as well.
Clearly, if the show is picking up at a different point in time, some major plot changes would have to be made in the writers room. One major plot point that had to change was the Dr. Daniel Charles storyline and the aftermath of him getting wounded. Diane Frolic elaborated on that idea a little more, also noting that the new story affected the other characters in the hospital quite a bit, as well. She said:
Well, we really wanted to do that immediate aftermath with everybody coming back to the hospital. In all of those stories kind-of being interrupted by that shooting. Well, we kind of had a whole different arc.
If it weren't for NBC, we may have had a whole different opener for Chicago Med this season. As it stands, we dealt more with the emotional state of Dr. Daniel Charles following his injury than a major will-he-or-won't-he-die episode. His opinions about his injury were at odds with Dr. Sarah Reese's during the first episode, and it seems as if both of them are coming from different places regarding his mental state, and with good reason. We'll have to wait and see what will happen with that story as the season moves forward, but one thing is for certain, Chicago Med does a great job in its first Season 3 episode of making it seem as if the timehop was by design and not by circumstances.
You can catch new episodes of Chicago Med on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET, only on NBC.
