Yes, The Rookie Season 6 will be hosting a wedding (as the ABC procedural marks 100 episodes).
And yes, Nolan & Co. will have to deal with the ongoing threat posed by the criminal mastermind who popped up at the very end of Season 5.
But there is so much more to look forward to as The Rookie unspools Season 6, starting this Tuesday at 9/8c (where it will now air between Will Trent Season 2 and The Good Doctor‘s farewell run).
TVLine sat down with showrunner Alexi Hawley last week to get a preview of his Cagney & Lacey reboot (of sorts), fresh #Chenford drama, and the (tiny) upside of only doing 10 episodes.
TVLINE | First off, preview “The Curse of the Last Shift” with which you open the season, because you obviously had a lot of fun with that.
I did. You know, that’s of the joy of the [police] “inside baseball,” the stuff that’s real. We have a writer on staff, Fredrick Kotto, who was a police officer for 18 years and so he knows all that stuff. Whenever he brings that kind of thing up, you’re like, “That’s great, because it’s true.” They’re all very superstitious, and to put [Nolan, played by Nathan Fillion] through that — because he doesn’t believe in it, of course, and then it all goes wrong — is so much fun.
TVLINE | And Juarez (promoted series regular Lisseth Chavez), meanwhile, keeps bringing it up…
Exactly, she’s so superstitious and can’t stop bringing it up because she’s scared of it, so it was a great pairing. A really fun story.
TVLINE | Episode 100 is the second episode of the new season. What’s the plan?
Obviously there’s a wedding — Nolan and Bailey’s wedding is the anchor of that episode. It was really important to me to do an episode that felt joyful, that celebrated our characters. I mean, we’ve done weddings before on the show, some of which have gone horribly wrong, so I felt like it was important to really celebrate and tell a really fun story for the most part.
TVLINE | I’ve seen it and it really is emblematic of the show, because there’s comedy and there’s banter and there’s relationship stuff, but then just when you think it’s going to be a full, light-hearted hour, you throw in some drama.
I really wanted it to be everything we do. That’s the joy for me of the show, is we do everything tonally. Some episodes skew funnier, some episodes skew more dramatic. I mean, obviously the season finale was an incredibly tense, action-packed thriller, but then you bring in people like Flula Borg [as Randy] or when we can get him, Pete Davidson, and it skews much more comedic. And I love that that world is still the same world. So, yeah, for the 100th I wanted to be able to touch on everything we do tonally, which we got to do.
