ABC‘s The Rookie has scared up another reason to subject Nolan, Harper et al to documentary cameras.
The light procedural’s previous documentary-format episodes involved a former child actor turned cult leader, the murder of the director of onetime team member Aaron Thorsen’s reality show, and the truly rare instance of two cops arresting criminals (“Dim” and “Juicy”) who looked just like them.
This time around, in “A Deadly Secret” (airing Tuesday at 9/8c), a documentary filmmaker (yet again played by The Rookie‘s own creator, Alexi Hawley) interviews the fine people of Mid-Wilshire Division about a complicated missing person case connected to Officer John Nolan (played by Nathan Fillion).
That missing person is Abigail Tierney, John’s almost daughter-in-law played played by Madeleine Coghlan (who, fun fact, since Season 6 has been a staff writer for the ABC series).
For this documentary, Hawley tells TVLine, “We found a fun way in to make it personal.”
And also quite creeeeepy.
“Every time we do one of these true-crime documentaries, we try to find a real one to homage,” Hawley explains. “Early on it was the Tiger King/Making a Murderer-type thing, and coming into this season we really wanted to do something spooky, something that was more Ghost Hunter-y.”
Cue Henry Nolan’s ex-fiancée and the frightful fate she met whilst researching a psychiatric hospital — the very one that serial killer Liam Glasser (returning guest star Seth Gabel) used to call home.
“The fun thing is to find a kernel of a case we’ve done before, to riff on,” says Hawley. “We had two, two-and-a-half serial killers running through [that hospital], and we literally get into the fun of that. ‘Is there something in the water?’”
Now, you may be asking yourself (as I did): Wait, when did Abigail go missing? “That’s fairly new information” for the viewer, Hawley acknowledges. “She wasn’t in the 100th [episode] at the [John/Bailey] wedding,” where Henry stood as his father’s best man, “so in my head this was the reason. But there was no way to elegantly put that out there.”
Another fun trademark of The Rookie‘s documentary episodes is that one unexpected truth or another always seems to come out, either during the on-camera interviews or as the investigation is revisited. “A Deadly Secret” is no different. In fact, it features a sequence that I suggested to Hawley is a “sequel of sorts” to the lie detector test Tim was subject to in the aforementioned Episode 100.
Hawley, with a smile, signed off on my metaphor.
“I think that’s fair to say, actually,” he concurred. For Sergeant Tim Bradford (Eric Winter) and Officer Lucy Chen (Melissa O’Neil), he teased, “There will be some unexpected revelations to come out of it — unexpected even to them!”
