The teens have spoken: veteran ABC cop drama The Rookie, which has emerged as a surprise hit with the under 18 crowd, thanks in major part to the show’s viral popularity on TikTok, has been renewed for a ninth season.
With that, the Nathan Fillion starrer, from creator Alexi Hawley, Lionsgate TV and 20th TV, has become the third longest-running ABC drama series after Grey’s Anatomy, which is headed into Season 23, and NYPD Blue, which ran for 12 seasons. The Rookie is tied with ABC’s 1981 primetime soap Dynasty and 1965 police procedural The F.B.I., which also aired for nine seasons. (9-1-1 is going to Season 10 but the series aired on Fox for its first six seasons before moving to ABC.)
“So far, the mindset across the board is, as Melissa O’Neil said, ‘Let’s Grey’s Anatomy this thing,’” Hawley told Deadline, quoting one of The Rookie’s stars. “I think everybody is having a good time, it’s a cast that truly loves each other and enjoys coming to work, they get to do fun stuff every day. And at this point, heading into Season 9, I don’t feel like we’re anywhere near out of ideas. Part of that is we’re not a procedural where I have to come up with a body drop every week. We really can reinvent ourselves a lot, and that helps with not feeling like you’re running out of story. Every time you bring in a new rookie or a new character, that also changes things. So, yeah, I would do this until they turn the lights out.”
Defying gravity, The Rookie Season 8 premiere was up from last season’s premiere in MP+3 viewership, ranking as the show’s biggest debut on streaming and among Top 5 ABC premieres of all time. The series is having its most watched season on streaming and closed out 2025 as the top broadcast show among teens.
“It’s been a great season, I’ll put it that way,” Hawley said. “I feel that our popularity has never been higher, which is great; we spoke at the beginning of the season about what going to Prague was like in terms of seeing the international appeal of our show as well. I’ve been feeling like we’ve been putting out really strong episodes all season, and people have been showing up.”
As for why viewers keep showing up, “I do think that ultimately the success of the show is partly because from week to week, the audience really doesn’t know what version of The Rookie they’re going to get. Is it going to be a big fun event in the episode? Is it going to be more comedic or romantic or scary? I like switching things up, I like that sort of energy of it.”
The Rookie’s overall Season 8 performance has not been impacted significantly by the series’ move from the post-High Potential Tuesday 10 PM slot to Mondays 10 PM to make room for new series R.J. Decker, with streaming making up for the linear viewership dip that followed. Hawley found a silver lining in the relocation, noting that Fillion’s previous ABC crime procedural, Castle, on which Hawley served as executive producer/co-showrunner, spent its entire eight-season run in the Monday 10 PM slot.
Next season, The Rookie may be tasked with launching a new ABC series, spinoff The Rookie: North, currently in the pilot stage and looking promising.
Filming On A Budget In LA: Tax Credit & No Major Deaths
Besides The Rookie‘s streaming resurgence fueled by a growing popularity among younger viewers, which started during the pandemic, helping the show score renewals year after year has been the fact that it comes at an attractive price despite filming in Los Angeles. The series, originally produced by eOne, now by Lionsgate following its acquisition of eOne, had been engineered from the get-go to be a lean production despite having a big TV star as the lead, Fillion.
That has allowed The Rookie to get straightforward renewals with no budget cuts attached to them, something extremely rare for long-running broadcast drama series in the current environment. That is again the case this year, I hear.
The Rookie also is yet to kill off a main character — something long-running dramas do for both story and financial reasons. Would Hawley do it?
“I don’t think so,” he said. “You never say never. At the end of the day, one of the things that I’ve always tried to lean into in the show is that you have to do the most dramatic thing possible when you can, even if it’s hard on the audience, like breaking Chenford up a few seasons ago, people were not fans of that. But I felt like it was important to do that for the story. No, there’s no plan to do anything crazy right now, but never say never.”
Chenford is The Rookie‘s fan favorite couple, Lucy Chen (O’Neil) and Tim Bradford (Eric Winter) who, after a painful breakup, got back together at the end of last season.
The Rookie being able to secure a California tax credit since the very first season has been key to keeping its budget in check. In the most recent round, announced by the California Film Commission last month, The Rookie was awarded $34.9M for its upcoming ninth season. That is believed to be the largest incentive the cop drama has received to date; it’s more than twice the tax credit the show got in 2024 for Season 7, $16.4M.
To illustrate how important the tax credit has been to maintaining The Rookie‘s look and feel, Hawley brought up spinoff The Rookie: Feds, which was canceled after one season, in part as casualty of the Hollywood strikes. The offshoot also had applied for a credit.
“As a sad comparison, I will say we did not get the tax credit for Feds, which also shot in L.A. and so that show was very hard to make for the money to try and make it an action-y show, to try and be out as much as we were on Rookie,” he said. “It was really, really hard. We ended up having to lose our ninth day to try and balance it. So, yeah, the tax credit makes a huge difference to how film-friendly L.A. can be.”
The Rookie uses nine shooting days for each episode, five of them out and about and four on set. That is a lot of on-location filming; Hawley recalls Castle venturing out only for two days each episode.
“Our show is a patrol show, we have to be out on the street and doing stuff, but we figured out ways to save money. We do have our ‘bottle’ episodes, we do episodes centered around the hospital, stories of the hospital, which also cross over to the station,” Hawley said, using the industry term for episodes done on the cheap, typically by using 1-2 locations and limited cast. “We’ve gotten good at doing episodes that don’t feel small, that are much more manageable, and that helps to pay for the ones that are more expensive.”
The Rookie‘s most expensive episodes this season include the opener shot in Prague, the Con Air homage with dangerous criminals being transported by a plane and the major explosion at the Mid-Wilshire station.
“The finale was not cheap either,” Hawley said.
In addition to Fillion, O’Neil and Winter, The Rookie‘s main cast includes Alyssa Diaz, Richard T. Jones, Mekia Cox, Shawn Ashmore, Jenna Dewan, Lisseth Chavez, and Deric Augustine. The first of Season 8’s final three episodes airs tonight, April 13. Here Hawley teases what they have in store.