CHICAGO FIRE — “One Hundred” Episode 508 — Pictured: (l-r) Joe Minoso as Joe Cruz, Taylor Kinney as Kelly Severide — (Photo by: Parrish Lewis/NBC)

Chicago Fire aired its 100th episode on NBC last night, but the series had a rocky start. In fact, one of the creators of the series thought the show would be canceled soon after it premiered because of poor ratings.

However, fans know that the series lived on, and it helped launched two spin-offs with a third set to premiere in early 2017.

Derek Haas spoke about that bumpy beginning in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. He said the following:

“We were having so much fun making the show that nobody told us we had to worry about ratings and all of these things. The first episode came out and it did OK. The second episode was way worse and I honestly thought we were dead in the water. We just thought, “Oh, OK, that was an interesting six months or year of our lives, but it was fun while it lasted. We knew the seventh episode was going to be a good one, it was a Thanksgiving episode and we were just thinking, ‘Man, if we can make it to the seventh, I think we’ll have caught on.’ And then lucky for us, NBC stuck with it, kept promoting it while playing it on Saturdays also. They didn’t get discouraged and let it breathe and then it found its audience. It was about halfway though the fall that we thought, ‘Oh, OK, maybe we’ve got something.’”

Haas and his partner definitely had something. Chicago Fire has almost five seasons under its belt with no end in sight yet. The series will return in January with new episodes.

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