THE ROOKIE: Alexi Hawley Explains Why He’s Hopeful He’ll Be Able to Keep the Cast Intact

It’s become practically the norm these days on long-running shows: Series regulars miss a handful of episodes a season, as a way to reduce the ballooning production costs. (Alternatively, some casts/producers opt to take a collective pay cut as a way to keep shows going/the team intact.) 

But at least one show is hoping to buck that trend. “I think we’ll be okay, but you can’t ever say for certain,” THE ROOKIE showrunner Alexi Hawley tells Give Me My Remote. (A note: This excludes cast members who have to be off-screen for real-life reasons, like Jenna Dewan’s current maternity leave.)

Though the series, which is going into its seventh season (which will bow on ABC in 2025), had ten regulars last season, “we’re at a place now where—between me and our amazing line producer—we’ve managed to make the show for the budget that they’ve given us,” Hawley says.

“And some episodes are over [budget],” he continues. “I mean, our first two episodes of season 6 were massively over budget, on purpose, but we managed to craft enough episodes that were under budget that we [planned to] have money to spare for the finale, which we did.”

Hawley credits “the power of typey-typey”—”My technical term,” he jokes—”which is the thing that I [as a writer] can do that nobody else can do: If this episode is too expensive, I can just typey-typey and now it’s cheaper,” he explains. “That sequence is too much? Okay, I’ll write a smaller one. We can’t afford that location? We’ll do a smaller one. It is a superpower that I have. So, yeah, at this point, we’re good at making the show. We’ve never done an episode that feels small, even though we’ve done episodes that are small. And so that gives you great confidence to go, ‘We can navigate it.’”

The writer acknowledges THE ROOKIE is a unique spot, though. “That goes to what ROOKIE does that very few other procedural shows can do, which is we don’t have a formula,” Hawley says. “We’re not doing a body drop in Act One that then we catch the killer in Act Six. And so because of that, if I need a smaller, more intimate story to pay for a bigger story…I’m not saying it’s special to us, but I think that we have more leeway in that kind of thing, because we do all these different [episode formats].”

“These podcar episodes we do, where it’s literally our characters driving around—whether it’s a bomb collar or a kid that’s been kidnapped from a hospital or, this season, we did the two girls who have been abducted…but you know, oops, maybe not?—those episodes we are very efficient with,” he continues. “We shoot those in seven or eight days. And we have a ton of dialogue; that’s literally just them driving around. And so those episodes we can do [to help with the budget]. But yet, you never feel like they’re small because you’re driving around LA for five days.”

Hawley, who was a regular on the WGA picket line in 2023, also cites this as a reason why scribes being employed during production remains such a big deal. “One of the sad byproducts…is that when you divorce writers from production, they don’t understand that power,” he notes. “When we were doing [filming], when I need a new script every eight business days for ten months to do 22 episodes [as we did in previous years],  you learn what’s expensive, you learn what’s cheap.”

But there are still occasional missteps along the way. “I still write scripts and they come in and I think they’re gonna be way under budget and they’re like, ‘We’re 200,000 over,’” he continues.”And I’m like, ‘How?!’ Then he’s like, ‘Well,  we have four different houses,’ And, oh, yeah, of course we have too many locations [so we pivot]. But it is something that people who make television for a living versus write television and then leave and go to another job learn: You have great power, actually, as a storyteller.”

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