After six seasons on Fox, the decision was made in 2023 to cancel the medical drama, The Resident. The show premiered in 2018 and garnered a decent following before its run was abruptly cut short. Prior to the show’s cancellation, speculation was quite high, and The Resident featured atop the standings for shows which viewers wanted to save. That did not materialize at the time, but now, those conversations have been reignited.
Two years after its cancellation, co-creator Amy Holden Jones and executive producer Andrew Chapman recently spoke about what would have happened had the show persisted into a seventh season. Speaking in a conversation with TV Insider, Jones revealed that should a revival become a possibility, much of the show’s cast are willing to return to their scrubs, saying,
“I think we would love — and everybody involved would love — to just go back into the show. Unlike some of these spin-offs, a lot of the cast would come and so we could return to the same world if we wanted to.”
There Is a Clear Plan for a Spin-Off of ‘The Resident’
Obviously, a revival isn’t the only means by which fans of the show might return to that world, as spin-offs of shows become ever more rampant. In regard to The Resident, the pair seem clear-minded about what direction such a project would take.
Both Jones and Chapman agree that Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who played surgeon AJ Austin, “would be great” as an option to build around. “Having him being the lead doctor and then you’d have a whole other cast around him and you’d have a whole other different set of problems that he would have. Or they had moved to a different city and he was trying to be something less demanding to have more time with the kids, but that wasn’t really working,” Jones said with a laugh, adding:
“I thought about him being a rural doctor because I worked once on an adaptation of a book called Island Practice where the local doctor in Nantucket is also a surgeon and he ends up being the everything doctor for a community. And I think that would’ve been very interesting for Malcolm, but I think he would be the spin-off. Or maybe Kit [Jane Leeves] and Bell [Bruce Greenwood] would be a spin-off. They could be great, too.”
The struggle to bring back The Resident is one that has lasted for some time now, and both Jones and Chapman are aware of how hard fans have championed that advocacy. Cast members from the medical drama have also remained open to the prospect, with Manish Dayal, who played Dr. Devon Pradesh from the pilot to the finale, and the aforementioned Warner, both voicing interest in returning.
Jones is aware that it might take a while, but should The Resident return, they stand ready to deliver, saying, “It’s hard to know what to do to push it over the line,” Jones pointed out. “But who knows? It took a long time for Suits to come back, so you never know.” She continued, “The thing of it is, we could work it out, and I always wish I could make people understand that not everybody can figure it out. Sometimes they do a reboot and you think, why did they do that? That’s not what appealed to me in the original show. But we would make it work.”
Watch all six seasons of The Resident on Netflix.
Source: TV Insider, TV Fanatic