The Rookie and The Rookie: Feds showrunners tease winter crossover event, Garza’s health, Chenford’s date
The Rookie universe is ready for its go at a beloved network television tradition — the crossover episode.
On Jan. 3, both the flagship series and its spin-off, The Rookie: Feds, make their mid-season winter premieres with back-to-back crossover episodes that see John Nolan (Nathan Fillion) and Simone Clark (Niecy Nash) teaming up, along with their colleagues at the LAPD and the FBI, to solve a bank robbery that goes haywire. EW has your exclusive first look at the episodes, via photos and a clip.
There’s also some outstanding questions from their fall finales. In the case of Feds, we’re anxious to know if Agent Garza (Felix Solis) is okay after collapsing in a cemetery in the final moments of the most recent episode. The Rookie didn’t leave us hanging quite so badly, but we’re still dying to know how Tim (Eric Winters) and Lucy’s (Melissa O’Neill) date goes.
In advance of the shows’ premieres, which also mark a new time slot for The Rookie on ABC, we called up the showrunners, Alexi Hawley (The Rookie) and Terence Paul Winter (The Rookie: Feds) to interrogate them about what we should expect.
TERENCE PAUL WINTER (The Rookie: Feds showrunner): I don’t know about you, but I’m very concerned.
ALEXI HAWLEY (The Rookie showrunner): In terms of updates, yes. On both fronts actually. We never mess with the audience, so if we leave you hanging, we’re going to pick it up when we come back.
How stressed or worried should we be about these folks?
WINTER: I don’t know. Like I said before, I’m very concerned about Garza. He’s one of our favorite characters. Things are not looking good, but fingers crossed things are going to work out for him.
HAWLEY: I just loved how in episode 9, how much of a family they’ve become in such a short amount of time and how they really did risk everything to try and save him. We’ll definitely carry that love for him forward as he’s going through whatever the aftereffects or repercussions of dropping at the graveside are.
You guys have found ways to weave characters from both shows across the series all season. Can you tell me how this crossover event might differ from those pop-ups that we’ve had all fall?
HAWLEY: Well, this at heart a case crossover. We do have characters who do cross from one of the shows to the other, but ultimately, the case that gets launched in The Rookie episode 10 takes a hard turn in Feds episode 10. There is a satisfying conclusion to a certain extent in The Rookie, and then it gets handed off to Feds as it goes to separate direction.
WINTER: And our favorite feds get the assist from our favorite former rookie at the LAPD. Nolan is going to join our federal agents to take on the handoff of what happens at the end of The Rookie and carry it forward and ask more questions. It takes us into a new mystery, which, we hope to conclude in a very exciting and satisfactory way.
Often, we see people on The Rookie saying, “I want to be a detective. I want to be a T.O.” Is anybody going to get a desire to be a fed at some point?
HAWLEY: Oh, from Rookie? I don’t know. We haven’t really talked about that. It’s a completely different mindset being a fed versus a patrol officer or detective. But it does happen, so I don’t know. We haven’t really gone down that road.
WINTER: But it’s a good idea.
Alexi, you really drew things out with Chenford for us. So, are fans going to be happy? No relationship is all sunshine and roses, but will we at least get something satisfying there?
HAWLEY: Ultimately it was important to get there in an organic way. He was her superior and her training officer for several years on the show. The 13 months of her rookie year were two and a half seasons of our show. We couldn’t just jump right into it. Once we started to go down that road with Dim and Juicy and the undercover work and everything, the last thing I would want to do is rush it or to do it in a way that felt surface. Audiences like romance; that’s what they want more than anything. The big Chenford fans have always seen this as romance, even when it’s not on the page, so to speak. But we’ve got to a place now where we have to keep going forward with it. There will have to be obstacles, there will have to be drama, there will have to be stuff, but never in a manipulative way. That would be really mean to the audience.
Terence, since Alexi was saying that sometimes people were seeing this on the page even when it wasn’t there — we’re still discovering these characters and who they are, but has there been any shipping that you’ve heard of that has surprised you?
