‘Chicago’ Shows Return, ‘Wild Cards,’ A Legal ‘Nightmare,’ Inside the World of Hit Men

Chicago Fire

The longest-running of NBC’s hit Chicago procedurals opens its 12^th season with a return—Taylor Kinney as Kelly Severide—and at least one departure, with Alberto Rosende hanging up his firefighter’s gear as Blake Gallo. As the new season begins, Firehouse 51 is sharing space with Firehouse 17, and with all of the comings and goings, what fans really want to know is if Mouch (Christian Stolte) survives his cliffhanging surgery and if Brett (Kara Killmer) accepts Casey’s (former star Jesse Spencer) proposal.

Elsewhere in the Windy City, Chicago Med (8/7c, NBC) begins its ninth season with a new face in the ED, Ripley (Big Sky’s Luke Mitchell), who has a history with Charles (Oliver Platt). And Chicago P.D. (10/9c) launches its 11^th season with a focus on Detective Hailey Upton (Tracy Spiridakos), possibly setting up her impending departure with a case that triggers her personal issues when she clashes with the team’s mental health clinician while shadowing a crisis prevention team.

Wild Cards

“We’re like Bones and that dude from Buffy. Castle and that hot girl. A Star Is Born, except you’re Lady Gaga and I’m Bradley Cooper,” babbles con woman Max Mitchell (Riverdale’s Vanessa Morgan) to her forlorn cop partner Cole Ellis (Grey’s Anatomy’s Giacomo Gianniotti). Could be wishful thinking, but there’s no denying they’re the cutest couple of mismatched crime-solvers to come along in a while. This lighter-than-air escapist caper, a co-production of Canada’s CBC and the revamped The CW, features a cameo by 90210’s Jason Priestley as Max’s jailbird dad (how time has flown). The set-up introduces Ellis as an unhappily demoted detective now assigned to the Maritime division, and when he’s ordered to babysit the bubbly bad girl Max, her “particular skill set” of it-takes-a-thief insights leads to their unlikely but quirky partnership. They have a two-month deadline to prove themselves, but I imagine they’ll be bantering far longer than that.

American Nightmare

Some stories are stranger than fiction. And fiction is what police suspected when Aaron Quinn went to California authorities in 2015, saying his girlfriend Denise Huskins had been kidnapped in a home invasion. A three-part docuseries depicts the surreal fallout when the couple is accused of perpetrating a hoax, which turns out to be anything but the truth.

Trafficked with Mariana van Zeller

The investigative series returns for a fourth season, with journalist Mariana van Zeller exposing underground criminal networks around the world. In the opener, she explores the world of hitmen, paid assassins who kill an average of 3,000 victims a year globally. Her investigation leads her to a killer in her L.A. hometown, then it’s off to South Africa, where contract killings are unnervingly common.

INSIDE WEDNESDAY TV:

• Criminal Record (streaming on Apple TV+): The police drama escalates the intrigue in the third episode, when June (Cush Jumbo) joins superior officer Hegarty’s (Peter Capaldi) team to help investigate a high-profile tragedy. Her snooping into one of his closed cases could have consequences, and does he really have her back?
• Family Law (9/8c, The CW): The third season of the Canadian legal dramedy catches up with newly divorced Abby (Jewel Staite) as she takes the case of a woman whose ex-husband left her for a man and now wants to use her last remaining embryo to start his new family.
• FBI True (10/9c, CBS): The agents discuss two cases in the latest episode: the 2011 manhunt for the leader of a murderous gang of Somali pirates, and a sting operation targeting a hitman associate of Boston mobster Whitey Bulger.