The Rookie is getting plenty of attention ahead of its return next year, and for good reason. After securing an early Season 9 renewal in April, the ABC procedural ended its eighth season the following month with one of network TV’s biggest finales. Despite the renewal, the creative team was reportedly prepared for the possibility of cancellation, as recently revealed by Eric Winter, who plays Tim Bradford. According to Bradford, the cast filmed an alternate version of the Season 8 finale that could have served as a definitive ending for the series.
As production on Season 9 gets underway, the crime drama has also scored a major streaming win. According to Nielsen’s streaming data for January through June 2026, The Rookie finished 12th overall, outperforming some of TV’s longest-running procedural franchises. While the show narrowly missed the Top 10, its performance is particularly impressive given its much smaller episode library compared to its competitors.
With just 144 episodes available on Hulu, The Rookie has amassed 12.817 billion minutes viewed during the six months. By comparison, Law & Order: SVU generated 11.952 billion minutes across 596 episodes on Hulu and Peacock, while 11.870 billion minutes of 508 episodes of NCIS were watched on Hulu, Netflix, Paramount+, and Pluto TV. The original Law & Order followed with 11.387 billion minutes on Hulu and Peacock. All three franchises also benefited from having current broadcast seasons in those six months. Meanwhile, at the top of Nielsen’s rankings is Stranger Things with 23.261 billion minutes viewed and Bluey, which previously finished as the most-streamed TV series of 2025, with 22.809 billion minutes.
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Collider Exclusive · Action Hero Quiz Which Action Hero Would Be Your Perfect Partner? Rambo · James Bond · Indiana Jones · John McClane · Ethan Hunt
Five legends. Five completely different ways of getting out alive — with style, with muscle, with charm, with luck, or with a plan so intricate it probably shouldn’t work. Ten questions will reveal which action hero was built to have your back.
🎖️Rambo
🍸James Bond
🏺Indiana Jones
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🔧John McClane
🎭Ethan Hunt
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01
You’re dropped into a dangerous situation with no warning. What do you need most from a partner? The first few seconds tell you everything about who belongs beside you.
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02
You have to get somewhere dangerous, fast. How do you travel? How you get there is half the mission.
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03
You’re pinned down and outnumbered. What does your ideal partner do? This is when you find out what someone is really made of.
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04
The mission is paused. You have one evening to decompress. What does your partner suggest? Who someone is when the pressure drops is who they actually are.
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05
How do you prefer your partner to communicate mid-mission? Good communication is the difference between partners and a liability.
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06
Your enemy is powerful, well-resourced, and has the upper hand. How should your partner approach them? The approach to the enemy defines the partnership.
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07
Things go badly wrong and you’re captured. What do you trust your partner to do? Who someone is when you need them most is the only thing that matters.
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08
What does your ideal partner bring to the table that you couldn’t replace? A great partner fills the gap you didn’t know you had.
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09
Every partnership has a cost. Which of these can you live with? No one comes without baggage. The question is whether you can carry it together.
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10
It’s the final moment. Everything is on the line. What do you need from your partner right now? The last question is the most honest one.
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Your Partner Has Been Assigned Your Perfect Partner Is…
Your answers have pointed to one action hero above all others. This is the person built to have your back — for better or considerably, spectacularly worse.
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Rambo
Your partner doesn’t talk much, doesn’t need to, and will have assessed every threat in your immediate environment before you’ve finished your first sentence. John Rambo is not a man of plans or politics — he is a force of nature shaped by survival, loyalty, and a capacity for endurance that goes beyond anything training can produce. He will not leave you behind. He has never left anyone behind who deserved to come home. What you get with Rambo is the most capable, most quietly ferocious partner imaginable — one who has been through things that would have broken anyone else, and who chose to keep going anyway. You’ll never need to ask if he has your back. You’ll just know.
James Bond
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Your partner will arrive perfectly dressed, perfectly briefed, and with a cover story so convincing it’ll take you a moment to remember what’s actually true. James Bond is the most professionally dangerous person in any room he enters — and the most disarmingly charming, which is the point. He operates in a world of layers, where nothing is what it appears and every advantage is used without apology. You’ll never be bored. You’ll occasionally be furious. But when it matters — when the mission is genuinely on the line and the margin for error has collapsed to nothing — Bond is exactly the partner you want. He has survived things that have no business being survivable. He does it with style. That is not nothing.
Indiana Jones
Your partner will know the history, the language, the cultural context, and exactly why the thing everyone else is ignoring is actually the most important thing in the room. Indiana Jones is brilliant, reckless, and occasionally impossible — but he is also one of the most resourceful, most genuinely knowledgeable partners you could find yourself beside. He approaches every situation with a scholar’s eye and a brawler’s instinct, which is an unusual combination and a remarkably effective one. He hates snakes and gets personally attached to objects of historical significance, both of which will slow you down at least once. It doesn’t matter. What Indy brings is irreplaceable — and the adventures you’ll have together will be the kind people write books about. Assuming you survive them.
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John McClane
Your partner was not supposed to be here. He does not have the right equipment, the right information, or anything approaching the right odds. He has a sarcastic remark and an absolute refusal to accept that the situation is as bad as it looks. John McClane is the greatest accidental hero in the history of action cinema — a man whose superpower is stubbornness, whose contingency plan is improvisation, and whose capacity to absorb punishment and keep moving would be alarming if it weren’t so useful. He will complain the entire time. He will make it significantly more chaotic than it needed to be. And he will absolutely, unconditionally, without question come through when it counts. Yippee-ki-yay.
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Ethan Hunt
Your partner has already run seventeen scenarios by the time you’ve finished reading the briefing, and the plan he’s settled on involves at least two things that should be physically impossible. Ethan Hunt operates at the absolute edge of human capability — technically, physically, and intellectually — and he brings the same relentless precision to protecting his partners that he brings to dismantling organisations that shouldn’t exist. He is not easy to know and he will never fully tell you everything. But he will carry the weight of the mission so completely, so absolutely, that your job is simply to trust him — and the remarkable thing is that trusting him always turns out to be the right call. The mission will be impossible. He will complete it anyway.
Season 8 of the hit action series concluded with the explosive finale, “The Bandit,” which saw Tim Bradford (Eric Winter) finally propose to Lucy Chen (Melissa O’Neil) on the beach, with Lucy happily accepting. However, in the same scene, the newly engaged couple are kidnapped by two strangers working for crime boss Heath Everett (Jeffrey Vincent Parise), despite Everett already being back in police custody. With such a shocking cliffhanger, fans are of course desperate to see how the story continues in The Rookie Season 9.
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The excitement doesn’t end there. Speaking with Collider’s Steven Weintraub at San Diego Comic-Con, series creator Alexi Hawley teased that a crossover with the upcoming spin-off, The Rookie: North, is already being discussed, which would mark the franchise’s first crossover since The Rookie: Feds.
“There might be one in the works, for sure. We started shooting Season 9 on Tuesday, this last week. We start shooting North in a few weeks, early August, so we’re already into scripts on everything, obviously. There are some thoughts being put to who might go north or come south or both.”
The Rookie streams on Hulu. Stay tuned to Collider for future reports.
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Release Date
October 16, 2018
Showrunner
Alexi Hawley
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Directors
Tori Garrett, Chi-Yoon Chung, Michael Goi, Sylvain White, Lisa Demaine, Lanre Olabisi, Bill Johnson, David McWhirter, Liz Friedlander, Daniel Willis, Toa Fraser, Anne Renton, Jon Huertas, Cherie Nowlan, TK Shom, Rob Seidenglanz, Valerie Weiss, Barbara Brown, Charissa Sanjarernsuithikul, SJ Main Muñoz, Nelson McCormick, Marcus Stokes, Adam Davidson, Anna Mastro
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Writers
Corey Miller, Bill Rinier, Zoe Cheng, Mary Trahan, Ally Seibert, Liz Alper, Nick Hurwitz, Racheal Seymour, Madeleine Coghlan, David Radcliff
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