For five seasons, The Rookie fans watched Tim Bradford and Lucy Chen fall in love. However, much to their disappointment, Tim broke up with Lucy in Season 6. Ahead of The Rookie’s Season 7 premiere,showrunner Alexi Hawley has teased what’s next for the fan-favorite “Chenford” couple.
Speaking with TVLine, Hawley addressed whether Tim still has work to do on himself following the Season 6 finale’s elevator scene. “He does, he does. We’ll definitely see a bit of that this season. At some point we have a scene where he’s at a veterans support group, so he’s still trying to do the work on himself. And look, the good news is that he understands what he did wrong,” the showrunner explained. “But in terms of the why, that is still something he’s trying to figure out, and sort of punishing himself for his own failures. The worst thing he could possibly think to do to himself was to break up with Lucy, and he’s going to figure that fully out, and then also deal with the repercussions of that.”
Hawley added that The Rookie Season 7 will include some positive moments for the Chenford fandom, revealing that they “really wanted to come into this season with positivity about Tim and Lucy. Obviously they did do a lot of work, Tim especially, at the end of last season. It did feel like they were coming back together in a way that was at least positive, so it was important to roll into this season going, ‘OK, we’re onto the next chapter — what does that look like?'”
Fans will get to see some of that positivity right away in the new season, with Hawley sharing that the Season 7 premiere features a wager between them that helps alleviate some of the awkwardness they now have with one another. “[It] allows us to play the banter, the chemistry. It allows us to lean into the competition between them that has been baked into them since the beginning, even when he was her boss, basically,” Hawley explained.
The Rookie is set to return for its seventh season on ABC on Tuesday, Jan. 7. Although typically part of the network’s fall schedule, the series was held until midseason this year. Disney Television Group president Craig Erwich recently touched on this scheduling decision, explaining, “The Rookie and Will Trent are two of the cornerstones of our schedule. It felt like the best way to platform those shows for success was to launch them in January, when we have this huge promotional platform in New Year’s Rockin’ Eve as well as college sports and Christmas programming.”
New The Rookie Spinoff Eyed at ABC
With The Rookie having been a solid ratings performer on ABC for seven years now, the network is once again looking at expanding the franchise. In December 2024, it was reported that Lionsgate Television and 20th Television are in early development on a new spinoff series that will be set in Washington state and focus on a male cop who is stepping into a new phase of life in his second act. Hawley is writing the spinoff and will also executive produce alongside The Rookie star Nathan Fillion. This would be ABC’s second crack at a Rookie spinoff after The Rookie: Feds, which aired a single season back in 2022-23.
