Over its eight-year run, ABC’s The Rookie has never been afraid to color outside the lines of the network-TV cop-show format. Last April, for example, Shane Madej and Ryan Bergara of Watcher Entertainment’s Ghost Files popped up, and the entire hour was presented as a documentary. But for this week’s episode, the show’s producers enlisted their most unlikely collaborators yet: Dropout CEO Sam Reich and four of his fellow Game Changer cast members.
Normally when we get a crossover on a network-TV show, it’s in the interest of some sort of synergy. NBC will look to service fans of its Chicago procedurals by having cast members from all three shows tackle a common catastrophe, or characters on CBS’s The Young and the Restless might suddenly show up on its rookie soap, Beyond the Gates. It would be natural for fans of either The Rookie or Dropout to suspect similar corporate shenanigans were behind this week’s stunt, but Rookie creator and showrunner Alexi Hawley says the genesis of this episode is far simpler: He just really wanted to work with the Dropout team. “I became a huge fan last year and started watching a lot of their stuff,” he says. “So I reached out to Sam because I thought it would be a fun idea: ‘Hey, you don’t know me, but is there any world in which you might be interested in doing this out-of-the-box crossover?’”
Reich “responded right away and thought it was intriguing,” Hawley says. He obviously couldn’t speak for any of the talent, but he thought they might be interested. “So we just kicked it around, and I told them what we were thinking.” Specifically, Hawley wanted to see what sort of chaotic energy might be released when improv comics like those on Dropout collided with the sober cops of The Rookie. “I just thought it would be funny to set these guys loose and have Nathan Fillion, one of the best straight men in the world, try and get witness statements from them,” he says. “The show really tries to live in the unexpected, storywise. I think it’s part of our success as a patrol show: Anytime they get out of their car, anything can happen.”
While the resulting episode (appropriately titled “Fun and Games”) was completely scripted by Rookie writer Madeleine Coghlan and not the Dropout team, “We made room for improv on production day,” Hawley says. “Clearly, part of the reason to do it would be to let everybody play. And Madeleine comes from an improv-comedy background herself and knows some of those people, so she was a perfect person to task with helping me do this.” The resulting episode was “just a joy,” he adds. “It was more fun than I thought it could be.”
Reich admits he was taken aback when Hawley first approached him about doing The Rookie, saying he initially thought he was being pranked. “I couldn’t imagine how Dropout would be incorporated into a network-procedural story line,” he told Vulture via e-mail. “Once I was sure I wasn’t being Game Changer–ed myself again, the idea of playing ourselves on national TV felt both surreal and exciting. Most of us were actors before we were improvisers, so I think we were all excited to show off our acting chops, especially on such a big platform.” But perhaps even more important, Reich saw doing The Rookie as an opportunity to bring new audiences to his indie streaming service. “Network TV not only reaches an audience comparable to Dropout’s in terms of size but a very different audience than is already aware of us,” he says.
Reich says that while he had heard of The Rookie before Hawley reached out, he actually “hadn’t watched” the show. He quickly rectified that, streaming several episodes “to try fit in as a performer.” And while Dropout staff weren’t involved in writing the episode or coming up with the plot, “The fact that Alexi was a fan helped us to feel confident that our world would be handled respectfully,” Reich says. “The team wrote for us and in our voices.” He was also impressed that, because Game Changer wasn’t in production when Rookie was filming, “They even went so far as to rebuild the Game Changer set in our own studio down to the last detail.”
As for Hawley, while he says his budding fandom for Dropout is what mostly sparked the crossover, he admits to hoping the episode will be a fun bit of fan service to one of his show’s fastest-growing audience segments: young viewers from Gen Alpha and Gen Z. Despite the conventional wisdom that folks under 40 have abandoned network-TV shows, Rookie has been on something of a tear in recent seasons thanks in no small part to a surge of younger eyeballs.
Per Nielsen, it was the No. 1 linear TV show among teens in 2025, and overall, the series was the No. 10 most consumed library show in all of U.S. streaming last year, racking up more than 22 billion minutes of viewing despite having far fewer episodes than top-ten staples such as Law & Order or NCIS. And even though the show is headed into its ninth year, it’s pulling in its biggest overall audience since its, er, rookie season back in 2018. “A lot of that popularity comes from clips of our show on TikTok and YouTube Shorts and stuff like that,” Hawley says. “And that is also how I got into Dropout: I just watched more and more and then ended up subscribing early last year. So I was thinking about how a chunk of our audience on the younger spectrum really does access media differently and how they would be jazzed by this crossover idea.”
Of course, as is often the case when smaller niche artists or companies interact with big established brands, some part of the former camp may not take kindly to the collision of worlds. As my colleague Jesse David Fox wrote last year in his story about Dropout, its fans “have developed a reputation for being young, progressive, extremely online, and deeply invested in the artists who appear on the platform.” So, unsurprisingly, Reich’s tweet last month announcing the Dropout episode of The Rookie generated a few hundred strongly worded dissents about what fans see as the left-coded world of Dropout crossing paths with a network drama they believe to be “copaganda.”
When asked about that label, Hawley doesn’t attempt to counter or diminish how others see the genre and instead says he and his team simply do their best to be cognizant of the world in which the show exists. “We’ve always been very self-aware about being a cop show in an age when policing has been increasingly seen as problematic,” he says. “When we set out to do something, we just try to understand the real-world issues we’re talking about and go from there.”
For his part, Reich has stayed mostly silent about the negative pushback on sites like X, but he did acknowledge them in a video post on his site and in response to a question from Vulture. He told us that appearing on The Rookie “was a rare and unexpected opportunity to be part of a big network-TV show,” one that felt too good to pass up. “But the whole reason this opportunity existed in the first place was because of our very passionate fan base,” he says. “When you have an audience this big and who care this much, you’re going to wind up disappointing some people from time to time. That said, we’re always listening to their feedback, and we’re betting on the whole that they know we’re making decisions that will help in the long run to make Dropout healthy and prosperous.”
Reich also revealed that he and his Dropout colleagues taped another small cameo on The Rookie that may pop up toward the end of this season. As for whether any Rookie actors might end up on Dropout, Reich says there are no plans as of now. “Though if our experience on set is any indication, the whole cast — perhaps especially Nathan — could give us a run for our money as improvisers,” he says. “We did a borderline irresponsible amount of improv.”
Related