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Over its eight-year run, ABC\u2019s 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\u2019s Ghost Files popped up, and the entire hour was presented as a documentary. But for this week\u2019s episode, the show\u2019s producers enlisted their most unlikely collaborators yet: Dropout CEO Sam Reich and four of his fellow Game Changer cast members.<\/p>\n
Normally when we get a crossover on a network-TV show, it\u2019s 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<\/a>, or characters on CBS\u2019s\u00a0The Young and the Restless might suddenly show up<\/a> 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\u2019s 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<\/a>. \u201cI became a huge fan last year and started watching a lot of their stuff,\u201d he says. \u201cSo I reached out to Sam because I thought it would be a fun idea: \u2018Hey, you don\u2019t know me, but is there any world in which you might be interested in doing this out-of-the-box crossover?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Reich \u201cresponded right away and thought it was intriguing,\u201d Hawley says. He obviously couldn\u2019t speak for any of the talent, but he thought they might be interested. \u201cSo we just kicked it around, and I told them what we were thinking.\u201d 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. \u201cI 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,\u201d he says. \u201cThe show really tries to live in the unexpected, storywise. I think it\u2019s part of our success as a patrol show: Anytime they get out of their car, anything can happen.\u201d<\/p>\n While the resulting episode (appropriately titled \u201cFun and Games\u201d) was completely scripted by Rookie writer Madeleine Coghlan and not the Dropout team, \u201cWe made room for improv on production day,\u201d Hawley says. \u201cClearly, 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.\u201d The resulting episode was \u201cjust a joy,\u201d he adds. \u201cIt was more fun than I thought it could be.\u201d<\/p>\n Reich admits he was taken aback when Hawley first approached him about doing The Rookie, saying he initially thought he was being pranked. \u201cI couldn\u2019t imagine how Dropout would be incorporated into a network-procedural story line,\u201d he told Vulture via e-mail. \u201cOnce I was sure I wasn\u2019t being Game Changer\u2013ed 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.\u201d But perhaps even more important, Reich saw doing The Rookie as an opportunity to bring new audiences to his indie streaming service<\/a>. \u201cNetwork TV not only reaches an audience comparable to Dropout\u2019s in terms of size but a very different audience than is already aware of us,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Reich says that while he had heard of The Rookie before Hawley reached out, he actually \u201chadn\u2019t watched\u201d the show. He quickly rectified that, streaming several episodes \u201cto try fit in as a performer.\u201d And while Dropout staff weren\u2019t involved in writing the episode or coming up with the plot, \u201cThe fact that Alexi was a fan helped us to feel confident that our world would be handled respectfully,\u201d Reich says. \u201cThe team wrote for us and in our voices.\u201d He was also impressed that, because Game Changer wasn\u2019t in production when Rookie was filming, \u201cThey even went so far as to rebuild the Game Changer set in our own studio down to the last detail.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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\u2019s pulling in its biggest overall audience since its, er, rookie season back in 2018. \u201cA lot of that popularity comes from clips of our show on TikTok and YouTube Shorts and stuff like that,\u201d Hawley says. \u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, its fans \u201chave developed a reputation for being young, progressive, extremely online, and deeply invested in the artists who appear on the platform.\u201d So, unsurprisingly, Reich\u2019s 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 \u201ccopaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n When asked about that label, Hawley doesn\u2019t 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. \u201cWe\u2019ve always been very self-aware about being a cop show in an age when policing has been increasingly seen as problematic,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen we set out to do something, we just try to understand the real-world issues we\u2019re talking about and go from there.\u201d<\/p>\n