ABC has canceled The Rookie: Feds and The Good Lawyer, a spinoff series of The Good Doctor.
The Rookie: Feds is ending after one season, whereas The Good Lawyer was canceled after releasing only a single trailer for its debut season. Feds premiered in 2022, a spinoff series of The Rookie with Nathan Fillion, which was recently renewed. The series was introduced during a two-part episode in the fourth season.
Niecy Nash-Betts plays Simone Clarke, the oldest rookie at the FBI Academy.
“I’m happy for little Black and brown girls to see something that they can aspire to be,” said Nash-Betts in June, according to Variety. “Less than 1% of Black women make up the FBI. She’s a Black woman over 40 in the FBI. She’s not married. She’s an equal-opportunity dater, if you know what I mean. Like, who is this unicorn? If she were a real person, she would definitely be my homegirl. She’s in her second act and she is making the best of it.”
The two spinoff series were canceled a day after Disney’s Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger said the company planned to slash an additional $2 billion in operational costs over the next few months. Although the writers’ strike is over and studios are resuming filming, scripted television is more costly to produce than nonscripted television. During the dual Hollywood strikes, many networks filled their fall lineups with reality-based television as both a cost-cutting measure and a way to continue pumping out programs during a halted entertainment landscape.
Also getting scraped is The Good Lawyer, which was to star Kennedy McMann as a lawyer with obsessive-compulsive disorder alongside Felicity Huffman as a well-respected attorney with “a fierce intellect and dry wit.” The characters appeared in a March episode of The Good Doctor but was shelved before its premiere episode. The characters could potentially appear in future episodes, but as a stand-alone series, it’s dead in the water.