Second Life? Major Update on Whether The Resident Will Get a Reboot
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Like several other canceled broadcast shows, The Resident has found a new audience through streaming. Not long after all six seasons were released on Netflix in March 2024, the Fox medical drama made the streaming giant’s Top 10 list in the United States. The Resident then topped Nielsen’s streaming list and took the No. 1 spot for the week of April 1-7, racking up 1.18 billion minutes of viewing time. With numbers like these, fans are wondering if The Resident will get a reboot. Keep reading to see if there is a Season 7 in the beloved show’s future.
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Will The Resident get a reboot?
Although we don’t know for sure, it’s not impossible. The Fox series, which aired from 2018 to 2023, centered on the lives and duties of staff members at the fictional Chastain Park Memorial Hospital. It starred Matt Czuchry as Dr. Conrad Hawkins, a charming and arrogant third-year resident who likes to take unconventional approaches to treating patients. Rounding out the cast was Manish Dayal as idealistic first-year resident Dr. Devon Pravesh; Bruce Greenwood as Chief of Surgery Randolph Bell; Malcolm-Jamal Warner as Dr. AJ Austin; Jane Leeves as Elizabeth Katherine “Kitt” Voss; Morris Chestnut as Barrett Cain; Jessica Lucas as Billie Sutton and Emily VanCamp as Nicolette ‘Nic’ Nevin, a nurse practitioner who eventually married Conrad and had a daughter with him before she was tragically killed off.
The series was cancelled after Season 6 in April 2023 due to low ratings. According to Variety, ratings for Season 6 were down 27 percent from Season 5. The outlet also reported that the show suffered a 12 percent drop in viewership, with an average audience of 6.9 million viewers.
Prior to its cancellation, creator Amy Holden Jones and showrunner Andrew Chapman believed that the show could have gone on for 10 more years. “Every single year we’ve been left on tenterhooks about whether we get picked up, just because of the nature of the fact that the show is owned by both Disney and Fox,” Jones told The Hollywood Reporter back in October 2022. She continued: “But I will always remember that by the fifth episode of the show, one of our top writers turned to then-showrunner Todd Harthan and said, ‘Oh my God, this could run for 10 years.’ The hope has always been there; I firmly believe that the show could go on indefinitely, but whether it gets that chance is outside of our control.”
Several other cancelled network shows have experienced a resurgence on streaming, including USA Network’s Suits, which earned a spin-off series not long after it was released on Netflix. S.W.A.T. also topped the Netflix charts following its release on the platform in summer 2023, which led CBS to reverse the show’s cancellation not once, but twice.
Fans are hopeful that the same thing will happen with The Resident now that it’s taken the streaming world by storm. Although it’s unlikely that Fox will bring the back the show, Netflix potentially could. The platform has given a handful of canceled dramas a streaming season (or two), including NBC’s Manifest and Fox’s Lucifer.
It appears that a majority of cast is also on board and willing to reprise their roles should the show come back. “AJ was probably my favorite role, definitely top three. And The Resident was really one of my favorite gigs for a host of reasons, and I think I can fairly say this about some of the other cast members, if not all of them, one of the greatest joys of coming to work was getting to work with each other,” Malcolm-Jamal Warner told TV Insider during a May 2024 interview. He added: “We really loved and love each other to the extent that I think we would all jump at an opportunity to get back together and work again on camera. We see each other off camera, so that would be a no brainer for us.”
However, it’s difficult to picture the show without Nic, who was killed off in Season 5. In real life, Emily VanCamp left the show to spend more time with her newborn daughter. Now that some time has passed, perhaps the Revenge alum would be open to coming back in some sort of flashback scene.
There are certainly plenty of stories left to tell if the show were to get a reboot. Namely, fans are dying to know if Conrad and Billie’s [Jessica Lucas] relationship lasted. Prior to the cancellation, Chapman told TV Insider what a Season 7 would have looked like. “Devon and Leela’s wedding, for sure. A growth of a family, Conrad, and Billie. The continuing growth of Ian as a guy who struggles with addiction but becomes an important part of the hospital,” he said. “Kit Voss as the badass CEO of the hospital … 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 Resident is available to stream on Hulu.
Watch ‘The Resident’ on Hulu
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