There are still months remaining before Chicago P.D. returns to NBC for the fourteenth season, but a big change has already been announced for the Intelligence Unit this fall. LaRoyce Hawkins, who has been playing Officer Kevin Atwater since the cop drama’s very first episode in 2014, is leaving One Chicago as a series regular. That doesn’t mean fans have already seen the last of him, however, and his final episodes suggest Chicago P.D. season 14 is repeating an old, universally-despised twist.
Hawkins is expected to return for two or three episodes of season 14 this fall, for the purpose of wrapping up Atwater’s remaining storylines. While it’s at least good that Chicago P.D. isn’t unceremoniously writing him out between seasons like Jon Seda’s Antonio, Lisseth Chavez’s Rojas, and Toya Turner as Kiana, longtime fans may also recognize that approach from just a few seasons ago. That’s exactly how Chicago P.D. wrote off Jesse Lee Soffer as Jay Halstead in season 10.
There aren’t many twists on television that are universally hated, but the method of writing out Halstead after just three episodes of season 10 likely qualifies. There are just too many similarities between how Chicago P.D. ended Halstead’s run as a regular and how Chicago P.D. seems to be setting up the exit of Atwater. The show casting a new character to replace him surely won’t soothe the sting of Atwater being abruptly removed from the show.
At the time of writing, Deadline reports that P.D. “is currently casting a new series regular, a Black cop who is an agent of chaos.” The cops of Voight’s unit historically have had no problems finding chaos with Atwater on the team; it remains to be seen how this new character will fit into the team with Atwater gone.
Halstead Proved Three Episodes Isn’t Enough
Jesse Lee Soffer returned for three episodes of season 10, which was announced ahead of the premiere and led fans to believe that those three episodes would be used to set up an exit for a character who had been part of the unit from the very beginning and was married to another detective. Instead, P.D. waited until his last episode as a series regular to really put the story in motion that would make him want to leave.
That just wasn’t enough time to give Halstead the exit that he deserved. Even though the show did touch on Halstead’s struggles with crossing lines for Voight over the years prior to his last episode, season 10 wasted the first two episodes when it came to the character. Cramming his breakdown, his resignation from the CPD, his decision to leave his wife, and his goodbye to Voight all into one hour meant an unsatisfying ending, which left some fans wishing that Chicago P.D. had just killed him off rather than try to justify his reasoning.
A lot of that likely goes down to Chicago P.D.‘s case of the week format. The first episode of season 10 was mostly Voight-centric, while the second focused more on Burgess and Ruzek. Saving the majority of the emotional beats that would drive Halstead out of the Windy City (and his marriage) until his final episode just didn’t work. In fact, a fair amount of the excitement surrounding Soffer’s return for the 2026 One Chicago crossover event was due to fans hoping he could be redeemed for how he left.
The crossover largely did redeem the former CPD detective, but Halstead getting the exit he deserved shouldn’t have taken four years, 67 episodes, a mega crossover event, and Soffer agreeing to reprise his role. Chicago P.D. wasted his final three episodes, which doesn’t bode especially well for Atwater returning for just two or three episodes in the fall. Upton got a much better sendoff, thanks to Tracy Spiridakos giving showrunner Gwen Sigan a full season to craft an exit for her.
Based on actress Karen Obilom’s Instagram Story (which has since expired), Atwater being cut from P.D. wasn’t the actor’s decision. Obilom, who plays Tasha Fox, wrote “LaRoyce is such a class act and I sincerely wish things were different,” and “We all do.“
All Of Atwater’s Unresolved Storylines
While Atwater has historically been left out of the kinds of inner-office romance storylines that all of his other co-stars have gotten to play out, season 13 actually gave him some solid development in his personal life. His night with Fox before she left for Miami resulted in a pregnancy, which originally suggested that Atwater might be written out via a move to Florida to be a hands-on dad. Instead, Fox decided to come back to Chicago to build a life.
Atwater has also been slowly but surely bonding with his dad, Lew, ever since they reconnected in season 10. That guaranteed that the CPD officer still had family roots in the Windy City even without Jordan and Vanessa.
Plus, Atwater has been primed to be promoted to the rank of detective for many years now. He once seemed like the most likely candidate to get the job, and the Intelligence Unit was out of detectives after both Halstead and Upton left. Instead, Burgess got the promotion storyline, while Atwater remains an officer. Burgess certainly earned the promotion, but she’s not the only one who deserved it in the unit, and the seeds were planted for Atwater to make detective long before they were for Burgess.
Suffice it to say that Atwater has many unresolved stories going into season 14. Even if Chicago P.D. abandoned its usual case of the week format to focus the first three episodes on LaRoyce Hawkins’ character, there’s just not enough time for him to get the exit he deserves with closure on his biggest storylines.
Chicago Fire Did It Better
Upton is arguably the best Chicago P.D. example of how to use an actor’s remaining episodes to give their character a solid ending, but Tracy Spiridakos decided to leave and gave the show a full season to craft her conclusion. LaRoyce Hawkins being written out after just a few episodes doesn’t seem likely to work much better than how Jesse Lee Soffer left. The best example in all One Chicago of how to do it right actually comes from Chicago Fire: the exit of Matt Casey.
Jesse Lee Spencer played Matt Casey as a series regular from the pilot episode in 2012 all the way through to the 200th episode in season 10. The 200th episode was also only the sixth episode of the season, and Chicago Fire has the largest ensemble of any One Chicago show, so it would have been easy for Casey to receive an unsatisfying exit as well. Six episodes isn’t that much more than three, when accounting for how large the Fire cast was at the time.
Yet Chicago Fire pulled it off much better than what P.D. did with Halstead. Each episode of season 10 slowly built up to Casey leaving, and it was enough to justify his decision to leave the Windy City despite previously having every reason to stay. The result was a bittersweet exit, with Casey heading to the Pacific Northwest to take care of the children of a fallen firefighter.
It even worked out in a way that his relationship with Brett didn’t have to end, and the door was open for him to reprise his role several times since, without Fire needing to redeem him. None of that was the case for Halstead on Chicago P.D., and the drama repeating the pattern of bringing an actor back for just a few episodes suggests that Atwater’s exit won’t be any better than Halstead’s was, four years ago.
- Release Date
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January 8, 2014
- Showrunner
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Derek Haas
- Directors
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Nick Gomez, Eriq La Salle, Carl Seaton, Fred Berner, Vincent Misiano, Bethany Rooney, Rohn Schmidt, Sanford Bookstaver, John Hyams, Nicole Rubio, Terry Miller, Takashi Doscher, Brenna Malloy, Lisa Robinson, Marc Roskin, Charles S. Carroll, David Rodriguez, Holly Dale, John Polson, Lin Oeding, Mykelti Williamson, Paul McCrane, Alik Sakharov, Charlotte Brändström
- Writers
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Craig Gore, Tim Walsh, Timothy J. Sexton, Mike Weiss, Mo Masi, Tiller Russell, Eduardo Javier Canto, Jamie Pachino, Mike Batistick, Cole Maliska, John Dove, Tiffany Bratcher, David Hoselton, Maisha Closson, Kim Rome, Katherine Visconti, Daniel Arkin, Todd Robinson, David Rambo, Denitria Harris-Lawrence, Mick Betancourt, Bryan Gracia
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Marina Squerciati
Kim Burgess
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