It's great news for fans who need more Chicago PD (episode count confirmed)

There has been some great news about the 2024–2025 schedule on NBC so far. All three One Chicago shows will be back in September. We’re getting excited for Chicago PD Season 12.

Of course, fans want to know how long the season is going to be. The TV landscape has changed considerably over recent years, and it’s hard to tell if a show is going to get a full season or not. This isn’t to do with moves from fall to midseason, but it’s linked to the time and cost of production.

Some of that came from pandemic protocols. However, the cost has come into play for a lot of shows in the last couple of years. Is it affecting Chicago PD this year?

Chicago PD Season 12 will have a full season

TVLine gave us the good news. All three One Chicago shows will have full 22-episode seasons.

This is in contrast to the plan that NBC had for the previous season. Before the strike action in the summer affected everything, NBC had made it clear that the Dick Wolf shows would have between 18 and 20 episodes, except for Law & Order: Organized Crime, which would only have 13 episodes.

We feared this would happen again. The episode counts for the Law & Order shows haven’t been confirmed yet, but at least we know Wednesday dramas will have a full season.

The appearance of characters may still be reduced

There is a chance that we’ll still have episodes where some characters are missing. This was another way NBC was going to save money in the 2023–2024 season. The plan was for characters to miss a couple of episodes here and there, and we saw that from the start with Torres being on furlough for the first three episodes of the season.

As NBC will still want to save money, it’s possible that we will see some reduced episodes for individual characters. This doesn’t take away too much from the episodes, as long as a lack of appearance is explained. The problem with Chicago PD is that its written out characters without explanation in the past, and we are always concerned that it will do it again.