How can we improve the way we train and recruit police officers? Can TV dramas serve as positive models for policing and help foster community?
Alexi Hawley is the creator of ABC’s The Rookie, starring Nathan Fillion, and Netflix's The Recruit, an espionage drama starring Noah Centineo that, in season two, explores the legal defense tactic 'graymail'. The Rookie, now in its seventh season, takes a look at aspects of policing often overlooked by TV procedurals. Hawley discusses the positive role police can play in communities and how he found his own autodidactic path to becoming a television showrunner. He was previously the executive producer and co-showrunner of Castle and The Following, and recently created the upcoming Hulu drama The Envoy which is inspired by journalist and producer Adam Ciralsky’s June 2024 Vanity Fair story about Roger Carstens and his team at the State Department who have brought home 70 American hostages during the past four years.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
The Recruit creates a lot of moral ambiguity and complex antagonists, raising questions about how much you trust. You’re known for The Rookie. You’re now doing The Recruit, how much about spycraft and the things that go on in the dark that none of us get to see?
ALEXI HAWLEY
The funniest thing is that when I first sort of got attached to this project and was talking to this guy named Adam Swieralski, who the show is loosely inspired by, he was a lawyer at the CIA right out of law school. He's an editor at Vanity Fair now, but one of the first things he said to me was that the CIA is not sexy.
It's the post office with secrets, which I thought was interesting; I've never seen that version of it before. The fact is that there are all these different agendas going on, but there's also a sense of not wanting to know. There's a great scene in the first season where they're in a staff meeting at the general counsel's office.
Everybody is talking about the person in the place with the thing. When Owen starts to give specifics, everybody runs out of the room because they don't want his issues on their shoes. You can get subpoenaed if you know something you're not supposed to know. I thought that it was really fascinating that it wasn't just all hands on deck, that everybody was on the same team. There was a lot of stuff going on that, if you don't know what you're doing, can be really dangerous.
It's just fascinating to think about living in the reality of it all. Most cop shows live in a very TV version, and we do what we can to be authentic and to make it at least feel real. You can't be real with everything because it's just not good TV.
The same thing with this show is to make the rooms that they're in, the conversations that they're having, and the fact that, in season two, Owen is very invested in the new gray mailers' journey and what he's fighting for. His boss is like, "We're not the Red Cross. Our job is not to help people. Our job is to protect the CIA, and this guy has it out for us." Just to really see that struggle where it's got layers was, I thought, really interesting.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Noah reminds me of a young Mark Ruffalo. he just has, yes, I know, I had to look it up because I wasn't sure, had to look it up because I wasn't sure, are they related? Um, you know, yeah, it's just, it's very easygoing, and you kind of think, oh, that's just him. But, it's very hard to do that, just have that relaxed manner.
HAWLEY
There used to be a time when leading men were okay with falling down as a character. Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones is a prime example of that. Even going back to the fifties, they understood that failure and falling down, but getting back up, is an endearing quality. It's a universal human quality. We have gotten to a point in the last 10 or 15 years, or maybe longer, where leading men often want to win every fight. It’s in their contract: "I have to win every fight" or "I can't fail" or "I can't fall down."
It's just such a mistake because the audience roots for you more if they see you fail and then get back up again. Noah is totally comfortable playing that character who's just trying to figure it out on the fly. Sometimes, he gets it wrong, but he's never going to give up. You can really feel that coming off the screen.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I think that it's actually good and more convincing because we've had a lot of spy stories in the past depicting American invincibility. I'm hearing all the time about the decline of the American empire. We have to accustom ourselves to imperfections and our fallibility to actually help prepare ourselves for these changes in the world balance.
HAWLEY
What I have found over the years is that the moments, because we have a writer on staff on Rookie who was with the San Jose Police Department for 18 years and was wounded 32 times in the line of duty, understand what he's talking about. Oftentimes, the stories that he tells that we then turn into cases or episodes get pushback because they’re not believable.
The same thing can happen on Recruit, right? You're like, "No, but that actually happened." It’s the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction thing, which more often than not turns out to be true; some things that are wildly improbable or coincidental actually are real.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
What I like about The Rookie is that it shows a wider spectrum of policing and policing as community building. There's a wide range of really important stories about the police people aren't just seeing. I think police are people you see when you're really in trouble, but you don't want to see them. You need them when there's something bad happening. It's such a tough job, I can't even imagine and I would understand if you become jaded. Your characters actually have a lot of heart, from Nathan Fillion's character to the others; they chose their professions, it was their second career. They had options. So I think it's really interesting to see that.
HAWLEY
The Rookie is a patrol show, right? Most television cop shows and procedurals over the last decade or two have been investigative shows. There's a murder in act one, and they solve it in act six. An episode is about that case. For us, though, it’s one of the reasons that we get to do so many different things because every time they get out on patrol, anything can happen.
They don't know, from one minute to the next, what's going to happen when they show up. Is it going to be funny? Is it going to be scary? Is it going to be overwhelming? All of those things give us a lot of ability to tell different stories about policing. I created the show in the shadow of the murder of Philando Castile, who was a Black man pulled over.
If you remember that horrible video, you never actually saw the cop that came up to his car, but you heard the fear in his voice. That fear had nothing to do with the man in the car; it had to do with what he brought with him on that traffic stop. My sort of idealistic vision coming into The Rookie was to create a show where we can be aspirational; where cops can do the job the right way.
There's a moment in the pilot where a man has shut down Hollywood Boulevard. He's having a mental episode, waving a bat around while standing on a car. That guy gets shot a lot in the U.S. Police officers often shoot people in mental distress, especially those who are armed. But because Nathan's character, John Nolan, spoke to him, he realized that the guy was having a mental breakdown, partly because he had parked his car with his young child in it and couldn't remember where he parked. So we saved the kid because we talked to the guy.
We always try to discuss things during the show, like unfair sentencing laws and how cops deal with them. Obviously, after the murder of George Floyd, we had some serious internal discussions about the show. I actually asked a few writers to give us a report card on how we had done in the first two seasons in terms of policing issues.
For the most part, we had done well. There were a few instances where a cop celebrated getting a no-knock warrant, which basically means the cops can kick your door in without identifying themselves. For the most part, we had done well, but it felt like we had created a version of policing that was alien to a lot of people. That's not their experience. Not everybody is always happy to see the police when they show up for a variety of reasons.
So, we really leaned into how to talk about injustice in the justice system starting in season three and how to keep that issue alive when the spotlight that landed after George Floyd's murder goes away. We all know that these issues burn bright and then, sadly, mostly go back to the status quo. I wanted to continue to talk about this this year and next year, so we try to be very conscious of the issues around policing when we create these cases.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yeah, and yet, you know, you must have ideas, or you've spoken to police officers, or There are ways to improve that system because you mentioned, you know, obviously, um, George Floyd or, when things go wrong, we hear about it. I mean, how can we improve that system from what you know?
HAWLEY
In season three, especially because it was right after George Floyd's murder, we did an episode where LAPD does have these community policing centers all over L.A. But a lot of them are in lower-income neighborhoods. They don't really service them much; they're sometimes more for show than anything else. Nolan and his training officer land there, and there's a moment when the community organizer who runs it sees Nolan trying to fix some stuff up in a park. The organizer called him out for it.
He's putting up security cameras because the park had been graffitied. The idea is that the police bring rookies to these neighborhoods to say, "That's what a drug dealer looks like. That's what a drug addict looks like." Usually, these neighborhoods are low-income and predominantly communities of color. So you're training police officers, both consciously and subconsciously, to think a certain way when they see people.
What's interesting is that during that episode, as we were working on the script, one of our executives at ABC wanted to warn me to be careful of the white savior model. I was glad he said that. I actually don't want to run away from that. I think we should call him out for that because I think his understanding of this neighborhood, which he just showed up at five minutes ago, is somehow more valuable than the people who live there. We actually have him being told, "You just need to listen. You need to ask the people here what they need, not go, 'Oh, we need to put up security cameras to catch more people.'" That idea was really worthy of discussing.
One of the big things we had to navigate during season three was how to not lose what our show is, which is at times goofy, silly, and fun. We didn't want to become a different show while we talked about these issues. I’m really proud that I think we did a good job of addressing important topics without becoming preachy because you help nobody if they just turn you off instead of watching.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I think it's a good reminder of what it can be, and it's can be a little idealized, but it's still real, right?
HAWLEY
One of the biggest issues with policing in the U.S. is that policing is a catch-all for society's problems, many of which police don't have adequate training for. People call the police for everything, and tragically, it often goes sideways. You'll get somebody calling about a special needs son or someone who’s having a mental issue. Sadly, a lot of times, it takes a horrible turn.
A lot of that is because the police simply have not received the training to truly understand how to navigate these situations. De-escalation is not pushed enough in police training. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of different police departments in the United States, and there is no one set of how they do things. California does things differently than Texas or New York, and even within those states, individual police departments and cities can have different priorities and training approaches.
So that lack of uniformity, along with the lack of emphasis on de-escalation and listening, creates challenges. We spoke to many people as we tried to figure out how to still be a cop show after George Floyd, one of whom was a police officer in South Carolina named Patrick Skinner, who ironically used to work at the CIA and then quit because he felt he could be more useful locally than globally.
One of the things he mentioned was a case where a 12-year-old kid playing with a toy gun in a park got shot. Patrick pointed out there were so many different ways to de-escalate that situation. Police have loudspeakers in their cars. They could have parked halfway up the block and told him to put the gun down; it didn't need to escalate to that point.
There are often times when a 911 call comes in, and it gets relayed through a dispatcher, but there's often not enough information. However, they always give cops the phone number that called them. What Patrick started doing was actually calling the person who made the original phone call and saying, "I'm the responding officer. What's going on?" If there's somebody in their house, is he still there? If he left and the cops don't know that, they're coming in looking for trouble. There are preemptive things that can be done, they're just not part of the training that cops get.
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I never went to school for writing. I was playing drums in a band in high school and college, trying to be a rockstar. I ultimately learned how to write first movies and then TV, mostly by watching them. And I'd put a movie on, and I would sit there with a notebook, and I'd sit there with a notebook, and I'd take notes, which I'd never look at again, by the way, but it was all for me.
That was about structure. Because I think structures is the first thing and the most important thing a writer can learn, depending on the medium that they're in. It's less so in novels, but I think definitely in TV and movies, so I would write, like: three minutes this happened, eight minutes this happened, ten minutes this happened, so that you start to internalize what audiences expect and also where you need to turn the story.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It's hard to marry that tone between drama and humor that you've established. I thought that the story about the juvenile offenders was important. Young people or even young officers, you know, the things that we do when we're still finding out who we are. We're developing hormonally, and it kind of makes us crazy. You show pathways back to civil society and being good citizens.
HAWLEY
Especially now, culturally, we are in such a selfish period. Part of it has to do with social media, which pushes a version of yourself out there. If you don't have a version of yourself out there that's popular, you're not popular and not worthy.
I had a moment with Nathan's character where we talked about putting yourself second sometimes. This isn’t meant to be an unhealthy mentality; you shouldn’t become subservient to someone else's desires. But at times, you just need to hold a space for other people's experiences. You might be going through something that I don’t know about, so being generous in that way is important. Sometimes, it's just as meaningful to consider, “My needs are being met. What do you need?” Let me put you first in this moment.
I feel like we've gotten away from that charitable idea in our society. It's just become so mean-spirited and selfish. Especially with the guy who's coming into the White House in five days, there's all this negativity. As long as you're in good shape, it costs you nothing to listen and be generous.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
In the past, I remember when they used to say television as “tearing families apart”. It was seen as antisocial. An hour or half-hour is long compared to the TikTok and reels. It’s immersive, you do get to consider things, critical thinking can be developed over time, relationship building, all these things. Social media and now with AI, that acceleration, it's just changing storytelling. What are your reflections on how it's changing creativity and the expectations of audiences? What are those things that are best done by humans and what we need to hold on to?
HAWLEY
Well, everything is best done by humans. I mean, has nobody watched Terminator? We all know where this is going; it's not going in a good way. But it has been interesting because TikTok, especially, but any of the short video formats are really designed to rewire people's brains. Yet storytelling has always been a significant part of our culture. People have loved being entertained since cavemen days, whether it's Shakespeare or Greek plays.
I still think that people have space for longer-form storytelling. I have four kids, and the youngest is 17, so they're mostly older. What they watch predominantly are things like Psych, Criminal Minds, New Girl, The Office, and Friends. Those are all older shows. The argument of network versus streaming is part of the equation, with The Rookie now having over 120 episodes by the end of season seven.
These shows are comfort food. My kids are part of the anxiety generation, growing up with everything from 9/11 to the financial crash in 2008, the pandemic, and everything else. I think people are desperate for distraction. TikTok is both unfortunate and comforting.
A lot of these shows have many episodes. You can watch them, put them on in the background, and get comfortable. I think they've seen every season of The Office about 16 times; they just start again. There’s something comforting about it, that’s not the same as what some people call "folding laundry TV." I think these characters are part of their lives; they're in their homes, and they're comforting to them. It's a way to center themselves, if that makes sense.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It's comforting, but that doesn't mean it's not nourishing, these your shows and those you mentioned, they create a sense of family. And at a time where, as you point out through social media, then we went through COVID, and there was this increasing sense of alienation and then stoked by the social media, which is the rage to engage and doesn't give you a space a breath to just, you grow up and be human and, reflect, and grow up and be human…they just want you to trigger your reflexes but not reflect.
So, I think it does serve a real role in ways that we didn't realize when television was a newer medium, we just didn't realize. Now we look back, and we experience television like old wireless radio–it’s something that's more part of legacy media.
HAWLEY
It used to be that there was a clear delineation in people's minds between a movie star and a TV star. Part of it was that a TV star is someone you're inviting into your home every week, while Tom Cruise is someone you're going to see in the theater. There’s a bigger persona; your connection to them is different than watching Nathan Fillion on The Rookie or on Castle, or some of the older TV stars.
You're making them part of your inner circle because they're in your house every week. I think that still applies, even as people are watching more movies at home. That delineation is falling off. But at the end of the day, I think people’s connections to TikTok and short-form video are different. My kids talk about little TikTok videos that are still stuck with them from six years ago, so it’s not like they don’t impact people. But most of it is just throwaway content that triggers a few endorphins, and then you move on to the next thing. However, I don't think it sticks with you the way an impactful piece of television or a movie does.
