Chicago’s History With TV Shows

Fans of The Bear can take our “Chaos Menu” Crawl, which stops at eight restaurants visited by Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) in Season Two as she works to develop the menu for the new restaurant. Film lovers can also check out our I Love the ‘80s Movies scavenger hunt to see locations used in some classic flicks.

By Dave Lifton (@daveeatschicago)

As previously detailed, Chicago’s current status as a film and television center came after decades of relative inactivity. M Squad, a gritty crime drama filmed in Chicago focused on corruption within the department, aired an episode in early 1959 that incensed Mayor Richard J. Daley, leading him to stop virtually all production. Later that year, The Untouchables, a fictionalized depiction of Eliot Ness and his band of government agents taking on Al Capone, debuted on ABC. It was set in Chicago, but filmed in Hollywood.

In time, however, programs set in Chicago but recorded in Hollywood were allowed to shoot footage for their openings and establishment shots here to give them a greater sense of place. In 1972, Chicago native Bob Newhart chose his hometown as the setting for his eponymous program, and the intro showed Newhart commuting from his Michigan Ave. office to his Edgewater high-rise (albeit in a very confusing way). A statue of Newhart, as Dr. Robert Hartley, sits at the eastern tip of Navy Pier.

Two years later, Good Times followed suit, interspersing shots of downtown landmarks like Merchandise Mart and Marina City with the Cabrini-Green housing project where the Evans family lived. Throughout the ‘80s, numerous family-friendly shows used Chicago as the backdrop while shooting on the West Coast, including Webster, Punky Brewster, Perfect Strangers, and its spin-off, Family Matters.

Two other sitcoms of that decade, where the humor was more PG-13, were set in the suburbs. Married… With Children showed Buckingham Fountain and Lake Shore Drive in its opening sequence, and the Bundys’ house shown in the exterior was located in Deerfield. Roseanne, and its reboot The Conners, took place in the fictional suburb of Lanford, but their home was in Evansville, IN., the birthplace of show creator Matt Williams.

And it wasn’t just comedies. The area around the historic 7^th District police station on Maxwell St. was featured in the opening credits of one of the most acclaimed dramas ever. But the city where Hill Street Blues took place was never mentioned during its seven-year run. However, there is no Hill St. in Chicago (and there are hardly any hills).

For much of the ‘80s and ‘90s, arguably the most famous programs coming from Chicago were talk shows. Los Angeles and New York dominated late night, but the Windy City became synonymous with afternoon. Phil Donahue moved his syndicated talk show from Dayton, Ohio, in 1974, and rose to national prominence over the next decade. After a decade, he relocated to New York at the very moment that another local talk show was quickly rising. By 1986, The Oprah Winfrey Show was a national success, launching its host to mega-stardom and a multi-media empire. Winfrey continued to run her program from her West Loop studio until she called it quits in 2011.

During Oprah’s reign, Jerry Springer—as Donahue had done—brought his tabloid-style show from Ohio to Chicago in 1991. His success led to his head of security, Steve Wilkos, getting his own program in 2007. Both were recorded in the NBC Tower on the Magnificent Mile before leaving for Connecticut in 2009.  

Chicago was finally seen in more than just the opening sequence of a scripted program with the 1994 premieres of a pair of medical dramas. Both ER and Chicago Hope had most of their scenes filmed in Los Angeles, but often shot outdoor scenes on-location in the Windy City.

Things changed in 2008 with the passage of the Illinois Film Production Tax Credit Act, which offered incentives to studios to shoot in the state. Three years later, the opening of Cinespace Studios in North Lawndale brought a large-scale, Hollywood-quality production facility to the city.

Since then, Chicago has seen exponential growth in the number of television shows shot entirely here, from network hits (Empire and Dick Wolf’s trio—Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., Chicago Med) as well as acclaimed premium and streaming network shows (Shameless, The Chi, South Side, The Bear). As Chicago Med set to premiere in 2018, Wolf described why the city works so well as a backdrop for television.

“Anything that is considered true blue, all-American, it’s believable in Chicago more than the strips on the coast,” he said. “This is literally the heart of the country, and all those Midwestern values are understandable to the country.”

Perhaps best of all, the film and television industry has been a benefit to the local economy, with an estimated $474 million brought into Chicago in 2018 alone. Cinespace has announced plans to expand, which will bring as many as 2,000 jobs to the city.