Our time with the docs at Chastain is officially over.
Fox has canceled The Resident after six seasons. The news comes months after the Season 6 finale aired on January 17. (At the time, executive producer Andrew Chapman had told TV Insider he didn’t expect to know the medical drama’s future until April or May.)
Season 6 averaged a 0.5 L7 rating in Adults 18-49 (down 27 percent from a year ago) and 6.9 million total multiplatform viewers (down 12 percent). Compared to its first season in 2018, which ended up being its last (consisting of 13 episodes) was down 69 percent and 35 percent in the aforementioned rating and viewership.
Because they didn’t know if they’d be renewed, Chapman and creator Amy Holden Jones crafted the last episode of Season 6 to serve as a series finale. “[We] really thought hard about how we would construct storylines that would give closure to the season, but if it had to be a series finale, would give our audience and our fans some closure to the whole series, too,” Chapman explained.
Tom Griscom/FOX
“So thematically, that sense that Randolph Bell [Bruce Greenwood] went from [a] bad guy at the beginning of Season 1 to sort of an emeritus benefactor, a guy with real wisdom at the end of Season 6,” he continued.
That was also why Conrad (Matt Czuchry) and Billie (Jessica Sutton) said, “I love you,” the EP added. “If the season started with, ‘what’s going to happen in Conrad’s love life? Will he be with Cade [Kaley Ronayne] or Billie?’ First, he’s with Cade, but then it never quite settled, and now he’s with Billie, and it’s where he should be. That felt like it nailed both of those ideas. It nails the idea of the season and of the series,” he shared. “Also, Conrad’s relationship with Nic [Emily VanCamp] started the whole show, and we watched their evolution, and then we watched her give birth and then her death and how he deals with single parenthood and then begins to love again. That’s such a spine to this show. We felt like Billie and Conrad saying ‘I love you’ at the end was really a fitting wrap-up if this is the end of the series.”
And Season 7 would’ve likely opened with Devon (Manish Dayal) and Leela’s (Anuja Joshi) wedding, following his proposal in the finale, and possibly featured AJ’s (Malcolm-Jamal Warner) family life, not front and center and more with James (Ian Anthony Dale).
Plus, we would have seen “a growth of a family, Conrad, and Billie. The continuing growth of Ian [Andrew McCarthy] as a guy who struggles with addiction but becomes an important part of the hospital, and the hospital is partially built around a guy with this frailty,” Chapman revealed. “Kit Voss [Jane Leeves] as the badass CEO of the hospital but also the married partner of a man who no longer works there full-time and is exploring what life is outside of medicine. The classic Conrad work-family life divergence, which we think has played really well through the seasons, his constant caring and his evolution from cowboy to slightly more by-the-rules doctor. Who will take the place of that cowboy? Is it Devon? Could it be Ian? Could it be Cade?”
The cancellation of The Resident comes the same week that Fox ordered the medical drama Doc to series for the 2023-24 season. The network also recently made a script-to-series commitment to the drama Archie & Pete, with Jones writing and executive producing and Matt Nix executive producing.
With this news, that leaves the following Fox scripted shows’ futures still up in the air: dramas 9-1-1, 9-1-1: Lone Star, and Fantasy Island, and comedies Animal Control, Call Me Kat, and Welcome to Flatch. The network has already renewed The Cleaning Lady, Accused, Alert: Missing Persons Unit, The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers, The Great North, and Family Guy for the 2023-2024 season.
