Chicago Fire has been on the air for twelve seasons now. Thanks to its ingenious emergencies and enigmatic characters, it has won Wednesdays for years.
Firehouse 51 feels like a family, and the members treat each other as such, which makes them easy to root for.
However, the show has not addressed a glaring problem in this family for over a decade.
The One Chicago universe is infamous for its lack of queer characters — at least queer main characters.
Chicago P.D. introduces queer characters when it serves the narrative like they do with Noah Gorman (Bobby Hogan) in Season 11, while Chicago Med meets an arbitrary quota every year.
Chicago Fire does a semi-decent attempt at queer representation, having a lesbian main character from Season 1. But since Shay died, the show’s token queer representation is nearly non-existent.
Queer actor Daniel Kyri joins the show in Season 9 and Darren Ritter is born.
Ritter joins Firehouse 51 from a troubled background, and the place saves him. He later falls into a clique with Blake Gallo and Violet Mikami, and the three friends get into a lot.
Noticeably, the character does not get equal focus as with his cishet counterparts. Despite Kyri being billed as a series regular, the show can never seem to decide what to do with Ritter.
We learn a lot about Blake and Violet as we follow their personal and professional lives. With Ritter, however, if the professional leaves something to be desired, the personal is non-existent.
Glimpses into his personal life are far in between and only serve to advance the narrative.
Writing a queer character by making them part of the narrative instead of isolating them is great. However, you run into other issues when they are only used to advance traumatic arcs.
‘Chicago Fire’ Fails to Do Ritter Justice
Ritter has had a few romantic arcs that don’t last long since coming out to his friends and firehouse.
In Season 12, he gets into a relationship with a cop, which is focused on for a short while. Later, it becomes clear that it’s the same old story of progressing the narrative.
In Episode 11, when Kelly Severide goes missing, Ritter’s secret cop boyfriend is on the investigating team, and Ritter tries to keep the relationship a secret.
When writing this article, it is unclear if the show will continue to explore Ritter and Officer Dwayne Monroe’s (Samuel B. Jackson) relationship.
We can’t presume to know the Chicago Fire writers’ room. However, when you see a queer character either horribly written or sidelined, it’s because there are no queer writers in the room and the powers that do not advocate for the character.
Kyri talked to TV Line about how the character came to be, revealing something peculiar.
“I remember the first year I was on the show, there was a big holiday party, and it was all three of the shows — Chicago Med, Chicago P.D. and Chicago Fire. That was the event where I really got to meet some writers and producers,” Kyri said while speaking about his early experiences on the show.
“I had brought my partner at the time with me, and of course, I said, “Yeah, this is me, and this is my boyfriend.” From there, I think they got to know me and who I am and started to take some cues from me for the character. It was a bit of life imitating art imitating life.”
It seems as if they did not initially write the character as gay and when they decided to go in that direction, they didn’t know what do with it.
One can see an alternate world where they kept him straight, and he’d have a huge arc by now.