THE ROOKIE: FEDS Post-Mortem: Alexi Hawley and Terence Paul Winter on the Crossover Conclusion (and SECRET CIRCLE Reunion) and Taking a Pause in Action to Showcase the Characters

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Tuesday, October 18 episode of THE ROOKIE: FEDS, “To Die For.”]

THE ROOKIE: FEDS concluded its crossover with THE ROOKIE on the Tuesday, October 18 hour, “To Die For,” as the feds tried to identify and locate the now-dead Rosalind’s (Annie Wersching) partner.

The man in question? Jeffrey Boyle (Thomas Dekker), who kidnapped another woman, and was torturing her when the team finally tracked him down.

Off-screen, it was decidedly less grim, as Dekker’s casting posed a sweet reunion between the actor and FEDS’ Britt Robertson. (The duo worked together on two films, as well as The CW series THE SECRET CIRCLE.)

“Well, it didn’t hurt [they knew each other],” THE ROOKIE: FEDS co-showrunner Terence Paul Winter acknowledges to Give Me My Remote. “We’re all just huge fans of Thomas’ from the get-go. So when it became a situation where we were told, ‘Hey, he’s available and he’s interested,’ it’s like, ‘Oh, my goodness, let’s see if we can make this happen.'”

“Then, after having some conversations with him, talking about who this character is, he found such brilliant specificity,” he continues. “He’s not just this evil monster—there’s duality to him. There’s a complicated character, which makes it all that more exciting when we have to go hunt him down. But also, here’s the other thing about Thomas: not only did we hear from Britt how wonderful he is, we had lots of people that gave us phone calls to tell us how brilliant Thomas was and that we needed to do everything we could to try to get him on the show. Thank God we did.”

Having an actor like Dekker play Jeffrey’s chilling serial killer also was essential given how much time the episode spent with him. “FEDS does something that ROOKIE doesn’t really do, which is the broken POV,” THE ROOKIE: FEDS co-showrunner (and THE ROOKIE boss) Alexi Hawley notes. “We really approach almost everything on THE ROOKIE through our heroes’ point of view, and we don’t tell the audience more than we tell them. That’s loosened a little bit over the seasons, but FEDS committed from the very beginning—honestly, from the spinoff episodes last season—to showing you the bad guy independently.”

“So to be able to go and tell his story—and the actress who plays his next target is also brilliant—the joy of being able to cut to those scenes and they be as powerful and as strong as the scenes with our heroes, that adds a confidence level to the storytelling, which is really great,” he continues.

And while THE ROOKIE has done long-term villains, FEDS closed out this arc in “To Die For,” as Jeffrey was shot and apprehended.

“We definitely are planning, down the road, to start bringing in [long-term villains],” Hawley previews. “We’ve already started a few characters that, in theory, we can carry forward, because we don’t catch everybody every week. It’s always a great thing to do, to create that larger-than-life villain on a TV procedural. But it also felt important on this particular episode to catch the bad guy, because he was so dangerous and he had hurt so many people—it felt important for us to get that win.”

But given Jeffrey’s father (played by Eric Roberts) was blamed for creating the monster Jeffrey became, could he be a thread the show picks up again later? “Oh, I don’t know; we hadn’t talked about it,” Hawley admits. “Eric Roberts was so good in this episode—creepy and weird. But no, we haven’t talked about that.”

“Here’s the fun thing with THE ROOKIE: we will introduce a character, fall in love with them, and we will keep bringing them back,” adds Winter. “Like the role of Officer Smitty [on THE ROOKIE], we just brought him in for a one-episode situation and Brent [Huff] is just so brilliant. But we love to fill our world with these delicious wonderful characters. And then, if we can, continue to build out our world and have them come back. There’s always a nice treat for the audience to make the world feel more full by bringing people back as many times as we can, when possible.”

One face who will return is Laura’s former partner, Mark Atlas (Deniz Akdeniz). The long-time friends slept together, and “we’re gonna continue moving forward” with that plotline, Winter teases.

And, notably, the show also took a beat in the middle of the action to explore all of the characters—and their dynamic with each other—as they relished in the fun of their FBI sleepover. (AKA a night at a motel while they were on the road investigating.)

“I think that act is one of my favorite acts that we’ve done,” Hawley notes. “Just spending that time with those characters, just [seeing] how good our actors are at bringing life to them. The writing was great.”

The luxury of being able to see that side of the investigators was something the showrunners didn’t take for granted. “We kept waiting for somebody to make us dial it back, because, to a certain extent, we’re not on the hunt for a killer during those scenes,” Hawley admits. “I mean, we are, but we’re really focusing on something else. And it’s tricky on network television to get away with putting a pause on an investigation without getting notes about losing momentum. But it just felt so human and real to do this. That whole sequence was so great. And then we had a little sexy time and then we went to a [catch a] serial killer. That was great.”

“When you have this brilliant cast that we were able to assemble, it’s like, we want to showcase them as much as humanly possible,” Winter adds. “And we love these characters so much. We want to dig deeper into them. We want our audience to fall in love with them as much as we have. And being able to show a little bit more of who they are and how human they are and the things that they’re dealing with and what they’re struggling with—it just adds to what makes the show exciting. Something that people would, hopefully, want to watch week in, week out, much like what we’ve done on THE ROOKIE for going on five years now. That’s what’s critical about the show: it’s about the people and how they’re struggling to try to solve these cases and help people along the way.”

THE ROOKIE, Sundays, 10/9c, ABC

THE ROOKIE: FEDS, Tuesdays, 10/9c, ABC

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