I don’t only watch network police procedurals of the past. (Though that is a large percentage of my weekly TV diet. Don’t judge me.) I do, on occasion, watch the network police procedurals of today. There are two in particular that have my whole heart. Will Trent and The Rookie. The Rookie is what I’m gonna talk about today.
Given all of the other givens about my life, the comic books, the general geekery, the love of cinema, my steady diet of indie drama, my whole East Coast Intellectual vibe, loving as mainstream and seemingly middle-brow a show as The Rookie is pretty incongruous. And it really doesn’t have as much to do with Nathan Fillion’s impressive nerd cred. I didn’t even watch Firefly in the brief time it was on. I’ve never even finished the show.
I was also a relatively late convert to Castle. I do enjoy that show, but not so much that I just had to watch Fillion’s follow-up show. I don’t even really remember how I decided to give it a try. I think my friend Jay Faerber is probably a key part of that decision. His recommendations carry a lot of weight for me.
When I started it, though, my expectations were very, very low. The good thing is it surprised me at nearly every turn. I’ve watched the whole show and now watch it pretty religiously and I continue to enjoy it. Even as it has, like a lot of long-running shows, morphed into something very different than what it was at the beginning.
It happens a lot. If you’ve spent ten minutes with me, you will have definitely heard me talk about The Fast and the Furious franchise, the king of “mission creep.” A film series that started out as an over-performing Point Break knock-off about East LA street racers who hijack DVD players has become a global juggernaut about nearly superhuman super-spies driving Pontiac Fieros into space. It’s a magical thing, in my eyes.
The Rookie has gone through a similar transformation. The show centers on John Nolan and the other police officers of the fictional Mid-Wilshire Division of the LAPD. When the show began, John was a nearly 50 year old rookie, taking advantage of the real fact that the LAPD is one of the few police departments without an age limit on recruits. John’s divorced contractor from Pennsylvania. But after helping to foil a bank robbery in his hometown, he heads to LA to fulfill a lifelong dream of becoming a cop.
So. Obviously, there is a strong element of copaganda to the show. That’s one of the things that kept it off my radar for a long time. It is very much about the nobility of being a police officer, the decency of the people behind the badge, the trials and travails of policing in a major, multicultural metropolis. It is, basically, a weekly, hourlong recruitment video for the LAPD.
That doesn’t mean it’s not good TV. It is very much so. While it’s called The Rookie and it does revolve (mostly) around Nolan, from the jump, it did some very interesting and unexpected things. One, it’s more of an ensemble soap opera than a straight-forward police procedural. In the first season, they introduce the Officer Training Program. Graduates from the LAPD Academy become kind of provisional officers, working with a senior training officer, learning the job on the streets. They’re judged and evaluated on their performance, on their knowledge of the law, on their abilities. After a few months, they graduate into being full police officers. It’s sort of a training hospital/resident situation. They can be bounced from the program, they can get demerits that will follow them for the rest of their career, the program determines the shape of their careers. So there are also stakes. Well, beyond the stakes of being armed police officers on the streets.
There are generally three rookies on the show, and, as they graduate from the program, they join the “regular” cops at the same division. It’s a neat way for the show to bring in new people, but also keep characters around. And it’s had a pretty stable cast from the start. Two characters, one recurring and one lead, have been killed off. Two others have transferred into other parts of the city. One rookie was indeed bounced from the program. Beyond that, the people who started the show are still on the show.
But what the show is is wildly different. In its early seasons, it’s mainly focused on the day-to-day life of a patrol officer in Los Angeles. The crimes range from simple misdemeanors like traffic violations to felonies like murder. But all of it is seen in a very street level, on-the-ground way. They make liberal use of the officers’ body camera and the cameras in their police cruisers (called “shops” because that’s where they go to work).
And, of course, that first season, John Nolan is very much in the center of everything. The question of his age, his background, his fitness to be a police officer was the main question of most episodes. He was older than the other rookies, older than most of the officers. He brought a very Midwestern “aw shucks” vibe to modern-day policing in one of the largest cities in the world. That friction animated the show for a long time.
But, over time, the other characters began taking up more and more screen time. Relationships and storylines that had nothing to do with Nolan began to flourish. The cast grew and grew. Nearly all of the cops have love interests and partners outside of the division. The crimes became more and more baroque, more complicated, more elevated. No more graffiti artists, pickpockets and petty thieves. Before long, Nolan is facing down drug cartels and serial killers.
All cops shows wind up with serial killers. It’s a natural evolution. Some have more than one a season, most have at least one who spans several seasons. In some ways, you can tell when a cop show has found its footing because it’s found its serial killer. We love a good villain.
In the last few seasons, though, all of that has escalated even more. Now The Rookie is up against international crime syndicates. They’re traveling to foreign countries, exotic locales. They’re going undercover to track international arms dealers. Yeah, they find time to hand out tickets for public drunkenness. But they’re also finding buried treasure and foiling assassination plots. In a memorable arc this season, Nolan is assisted by a roving artificial intelligence. They’re skirting the edges of true sci-fi and will probably cross that line eventually.
Normally, this is what you call “jumping the shark.” For those not indoctrinated with TV jargon, that’s when a show fully leaves behind what it started as and becomes something wildly different and usually less good. It takes its name from the episode of Happy Days when Fonzie literally jumped a motorcycle over a shark tank for…reasons. Ironically, though, Fonzie is a prime example of mission creep. He began the show as a side character, a foil to the clean-cut Richie Cunningham. But before long he was a lead character and then eventually, took the show over completely.
John Nolan catching international arms dealers with the help of an AI lands somewhere in between the two. It depends on what the next move is. If they wind up busting aliens on the space station, The Rookie might have gone too far.
In the meantime, it’s a good show. It’s a kind of escapism that, even as copaganda, I can appreciate. Because it seems to take place in some parallel fantasy dimension where people only join the police force to do good things, where there is very little racial profiling, where all of the cops are there for the right reasons. They had one racist cop in one season, they’ve had corrupt cops, but they’ve never had just a straight bully cop, someone who enjoys wielding power over others. It’s nice to think it could be like that.
This season, the parallel universe extends to the federal government. It’s a cop show set in 2026 Los Angeles in 2026 America and there’s been no ICE surge, no civilians shot by federal officers, no cops assisting in grabbing innocent people off the streets. They’re partnering with an FBI that’s run by competent, reasonable agents, focused on stopping threats to the country, not prosecuting the President’s “enemies, protecting the wealthy and powerful or getting drunk at the Olympics.
I’m a bit torn by those decisions. On one hand, it is actually nice to feel like there’s a world of good, reasonable people out there somewhere. On the other, it’s not the world we live in but it looks a lot like it, so it’s easy to think that The Rookie is showing us the world as it is. To its credit, the show never really acts like this is the real world. In fact, the more fanciful, exaggerated elements help you to remember that it’s TV, it’s not reality. There are ways that mission creep can be a good thing, I guess.
Either way, The Rookie has been renewed for a ninth season and is, apparently, pretty popular with younger audiences. So it’s doing something right. For all the sharks it’s jumped, it just keeps landing and going on. I’m okay with that.