The Rookie’s pilot episode introduced a romance between Nolan and Chen that would have ruined the series if it had continued past Season 1.
ABC’s crime drama The Rookie almost got overshadowed by a Big Romance™ in Season 1, which may have made sense on a story document before the show debuted but didn’t work on screen. The disastrous pairing for Nathan Fillion’s character John Nolan nearly doomed the series as it was still trying to find its audience. If producers forced the unpopular romance to continue, The Rookie may have lost its most passionate fans.
John Nolan started the show as a 40-year-old rookie police officer, looking to change his life after a divorce and surviving a bank robbery. He befriended two fellow recruits in the police academy, the core characters in Season 1. One of them, Lucy Chen (as played by Dark Matter’s Melissa O’Neil) was revealed at the end of the pilot to be Nolan’s secret girlfriend. It was a clear attempt to imbue The Rookie with a romance subplot like many other procedurals. Instead of the classic “will they or won’t they?” dynamic, perfected in the 1980s by Moonlighting, storytellers made their relationship a fireable offense. To their dismay, instead of Officer Chen and Nolan launching a thousand shippers, fans were not happy. The Rookie is a series with a lot of action and gunfire, but it’s the relationships between the characters that keep audiences tuning in each week or bingeing on streaming. The love affair between John Nolan and Lucy Chen was the wrong choice from the beginning.
Updated by Joshua M. Patton on November 22nd, 2023: The Rookie is officially returning for a sixth season in February 2024. This article has been updated to reflect the latest news regarding the beloved police procedural.
Why John Nolan and Lucy Chen Felt Mismatched
Part of the problem that fans of The Rookie had with Nolan and Chen’s romance was that so much of the series is about how John Nolan is too old to be a rookie in the LAPD. A 20-year age gap between characters is already a hurdle for some shippers, but the constant attention drawn to Nolan’s age made the relationship feel just north of creepy. Chen was Nolan’s peer at the time, but something about the whole thing felt off to the fans — even those primed to see any Nathan Fillion character as the only love interest that matters.
But it wasn’t just the age gap that made the pairing fail. Perhaps if viewers had seen Nolan and Chen fall in love on the job instead of being expected to just accept Chen and Nolan as “hashtag goals”, their romance may have worked. A slow burn for The Rookie’s main romance may have worked well, but instead, the series went in the complete opposite direction. Throughout Season 1, and especially in the pilot episode, audiences are meant to learn that being a police officer is deeply important to all the rookies, especially Nolan. So, instead of a love that defies the laws of man and nature, Nolan and Chen’s relationship creates incongruity in his and her character.
Inappropriateness can be hot because the person Chen has the most on-screen chemistry with is Tim Bradford (played by Eric Winter). If any Chen relationship is the “endgame,” it’s that one, because the audience has seen (painstakingly, in fact) how their feelings for each other are larger than any protocols or promises they made on the job. Still, there were LAPD lines he wouldn’t cross. Bradford would never “organically” start a romance with her, showrunner Alexi Hawley told TVLine at the end of Season 2, because Bradford was Chen’s training officer. While Nolan and Chen were peers, as her training officer the power imbalance in the relationship would lead only to disaster.
Nolan And Chen Could Have Caused Bigger Problems
As a character, Bradford is almost a trope. He was the “tough as nails” training officer at first, quickly proving himself to be a genuine and caring professional trying his best to make Lucy Chen the best cop she can be. He was a stickler for the rules but had a complicated past. If the storytellers wrote about the flirtatious chemistry between Bradford and Chen, Nolan would become the jealous boyfriend. If they hadn’t, then Bradford would’ve been the engine by which the surreptitious love affair between Nolan and Chen would be discovered. Once the romance with Chen was over, Nolan and Bradford formed one of The Rookie’s most interesting relationships.
Bradford may be the wise, experienced figure while he and Nolan are at work, but that’s not necessarily the case when they are off duty. They are men of a similar age, and unlike anyone other than Sergeant Gray, they understand what it’s like to be a police officer at that age. Like Nolan, Bradford’s first marriage fell apart. When Bradford starts dating Chen’s friend Rachel Hall (played by Jasmine Mathews), Nolan is able to give him advice above moving on romantically after the marriage ends. Instead of delving into tired tropes of toxic masculinity, Bradford and Nolan actually bond over their feelings for Chen when she is almost killed by Rosalind Dyer (played by the late Annie Wersching) and her accomplice. Nolan and Chen’s relationship was over by then, and Bradford was still wrestling with his love for Lucy.
Do Nolan And Chen Get Back Together In The Rookie?
Chen is no longer Bradford’s rookie, allowing him to become her main love interest moving forward. This time the fans encouraged “Chenford” passionately. This gave the audience the kind of “will they or won’t they?” dynamic, a classic trope in TV drama because, well, it works. With each successive episode in Season 4, Bradford and Chen slowly became the ideal model for a slow-burn relationship. Where O’Neil’s and Winter’s chemistry is electric, the chemistry between her and Fillion is less so. Even when they were supposed to be a couple, they felt more like siblings than romantic partners. That chemistry is now one of the better friendships on The Rookie, especially since Chen’s roommate and pal Jackson West was killed off when Titus Makin Jr. left the show. Nolan has a very avuncular vibe, and that works best with the other rookies and his peers on the force.
Yet Nolan and Chen’s regrettable romance could still make for story fodder as Bradford and Chen have crossed that line Hawley was talking about with a long-awaited kiss in the Season 4 finale. And now that Chenford is finally a reality, it could put some conflict back in Bradford and Nolan’s relationship. But it would allow for Nolan to run interference with these two should the story demand it. If Nolan is able to help Bradford and Chen through a rough patch, that would fit with the type of friend and colleague he’s become through the years.
Chenford Is Now the ‘Star’ of The Rookie
Nathan Fillion may be the series lead, but he’s not the only “star” anymore. As the show goes on, The Rookie is less about John Nolan and more about the ensemble. The (now former) rookie in his 40s is not the playboy heartthrob. He’s the leader of their little band and a trusted friend they can rely on. His character works best with an outside love interest like Jenna Dewan’s Bailey Nune. She’s a firefighter, so, despite all the times she and Nolan cross paths in the field, they don’t technically work together. A romance between him and any of the core group would have altered that dynamic in a way the series might not recover from — and which the series narrowly avoided by breaking up Nolan and Chen. Instead, the writers are creating a parallel between Chenford and Bradford’s marriage to Mircea Monroe’s Isabel.
Isabel was a police officer, working undercover on the narcotics squad. The LAPD failed her as an organization, because she fell victim to addiction and ended up committing a crime. They then used her past against her to force her to do another undercover operation in which she was shot. Thankfully, she was able to get clean, and Isabel even returned in Season 5 to help rescue a former comrade who fell victim to similar troubles. (It also created some fun tension for Tim and Lucy, who had just begun their romantic relationship.) Yet, throughout Seasons 4 and 5, Lucy has shown an aptitude for undercover work. The Rookie Season 5 finale ended with her going undercover on a long operation. Season 6 will likely focus on Bradford’s fears of history repeating itself.
