The Rookie Boss Teases Chenford’s Next Chapter After Season 7 Finale: ‘We’ve Turned a Corner

The Rookie creator and showrunner Alexi Hawley gives fans an idea of what to expect from Chenford in Season 8.

Speaking to ScreenRant, Hawley was asked about why Eric Winter and Melissa O’Neil’s Tim Bradford and Lucy Chen didn’t actually get back together during the recently aired Sesaon 7 finale. “Ultimately, you leave that episode knowing where it’s going to go,” Hawley said. “I think you feel very positive about it. Obviously, Tim has done the work. Lucy and Tim still need to talk about it.”

“One of the things that I think is clearly established during the course of our show is that healthy communication is not always their strong suit, but we’ve turned a corner. We’re heading in a good direction… Let’s put it that way,” Hawley continued. “We’re heading in a really good direction for fans of Chenford. This season has taken them on a journey that we all felt, on the show and in the room, was important to both deal with the real repercussions of what Tim did and the very real pain that he caused, including to himself, and trying to figure out why he did what he did and having Lucy have to forgive him. That didn’t feel like a ‘three episodes and everything’s good again’ kind of story.”

Hawley went on to promise fans that the series isn’t “teasing anybody” regarding where Tim and Lucy’s long-running on-again-off-again relationship is headed when The Rookie returns for Season 8.

The Rookie, which stars Nathan Fillion as late-in-life LAPD rookie officer John Nolan, quickly rose to the top of the charts following its release in 2018, and has only continued to rise in popularity since then. The series’ seventh season proved to be one of the most explosive yet, with multiple recurring storylines coming to a head over the course of its 18-episode run. The Rookie Season 7 managed to maintain strong ratings throughout, averaging around 3 million viewers per episode, which is in line with other later seasons of the hit police procedural.

The Rookie Will Return for Season 8

Fans can look forward to plenty more action when The Rookie returns for Season 8, as well as the return of several fan-favorite characters. Back in April, Hawley said of Season 8 that comedian Flula Borg’s fan-favorite recurring character “Skip Tracer Randy comes back to us, I think it’s [Episode] 17, in a really fun storyline.” This not only confirmed the return of Skip Tracer Randy, but also the likelihood that The Rookie‘s eighth season will match Season 7 in terms of episode count. To top things off, one of The Rookie‘s newest rising stars, Deric Augustine, will be making the switch from recurring to leading cast member for Season 8 in the role of Miles Penn, who made his debut on the series this year on the Season 7 premiere episode, “The Shot.”