THE ROOKIE: Alexi Hawley Teases the Return of Plain Clothes Day

As THE ROOKIE’s squad has to deal with a local vigilante, they have another big thing to contend with on the Tuesday, January 14 episode: Plain Clothes Day.

“Plain Clothes Day, which is a real thing, is obviously an opportunity for a police officer, a rookie, to ride alongside their training officer,” THE ROOKIE creator Alexi Hawley points out to Give Me My Remote. “But the training officer’s in plain clothes and is not there, basically—their cop is on their own. And the training officer only steps in if something crazy happens. But for us, it was also an opportunity for Nolan as a rookie training officer, his first Plain Clothes Day as a rookie training officer, to have it not just be a story about Celina’s experience. And so the sort of fun of that [experience is] that they’re both being judged; the watch commander is judging both of them in that moment. [It] made it a story that, even though we’ve done Plain Clothes Day before with our other rookies, this was a fresh way in.”

The hour, “The Watcher,” will also dive into the reveal that one of the new rookies, Miles (Deric Augustine), is unhoused and living in his car. “It felt important, as we always try and do, to sort of deal with the real of what people go through in the world,” Hawley notes. “Housing instability is a very real thing, especially in cities that are as expensive as Los Angeles. And to have this guy who was a police officer in Texas, who didn’t make a ton of money, and, as we’ll see over the coming episodes, had some personal stuff happen that got him in a bit of a financial hole, I think that’s a really powerful moment to realize that this guy is who’s cocky and confident and a cowboy, lives in his car.”

“There will definitely be some jeopardy from it because it’s just not safe for a police officer to live in their car,” he continues. “They have an off-duty weapon, they have all that kind of stuff. So there’ll be potential fallout in the coming episodes based on that. But we just thought that that was a really sort of powerful sort of conversation to have.” 

THE ROOKIE, Tuesdays, 10/9c, ABC

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