Will ‘The Resident’ Be Renewed? Boss Addresses Short Season 6, Plus What’s Still Ahead
Q&A
The Resident didn’t just end its 2022 episodes with Dr. Conrad Hawkins (Matt Czuchry) and Dr. Billie Sutton (Jessica Lucas) kissing. The Fox medical drama also set up quite a few storylines for the final three episodes of Season 6.
There’s still the matter of Dr. Kit Voss’s (Jane Leeves) and Dr. Randolph Bell’s (Bruce Greenwood) fight against the governor (Steven Culp), who’s eager to slash the hospital’s budget and personally go after Bell for what he said in front of the press. There’s Padma (Aneesha Joshi), who was last seen standing on the edge of a bridge.
Showrunner Andrew Chapman shares what to expect.
Bell’s worried about his MS progressing. Is it? Or is it just the stress?
Andrew Chapman: That’s the thing — not to play both sides — that’s so interesting and complicated about MS. Sometimes MS progresses if you lead an entirely stress-free life. But often, stress can be a prompt for a flareup. And patients who have MS often try to keep their stress level managed so that they don’t get really bad flare-ups and so the disease doesn’t progress. MS is a very mysterious, hard-to-predict disease. That’s what we’re playing with, and that’s what Bell is struggling with: Is this stress, or is this just the inevitable progression of my disease?
The governor keeps coming after him — the lawsuit, the article — but I like how Kit handles it. But how much worse is it gonna get for all sides of it? Because Kit wants to protect her husband, she has to protect Chastain, and the governor will use anything basically.
It gets worse and worse, but then in Episodes 12 and 13, you’re gonna like be, “Oh my God, I can’t believe that’s what’s happening.” And there’ll be a really big, really fun twist. The thing that we’re playing in [Episode] 11 is Chastain is gonna have to shut down their Level 1 Trauma, and they’re not gonna be as impressive a hospital anymore, and they’re gonna have to begin shutting down units. But at the beginning of [Episode] 12, an amazing thing happens and that will involve the governor, and we’ll have to see where it all goes, but it’s gonna be big.
Does the governor come to Chastain as a patient and need the things that he caused to be shut down?
Can’t give that away, Meredith, you know that. Let me just say it is going to be really fun, and it will give nice closure to the season and to the governor story.
Tom Griscom/FOX
What’s next for Kit and Bell as a couple?
I’ve said this to you a million times, and I still say it. They’re the backbone of the show in this weird way. They’re the stable, married couple that just gives you a sense of certainty and closure, and they’re just wonderful.
We intend to keep playing them as wonderful and that as each has his or her crises in their personal life in their professional life, the other one is there for them. That’s where we want to go with it. Their soap is their individual conflicts, but their relationship soap is that they love each other desperately and will do anything for each other, and I just think our audience loves that. They eat that up. They see in those two people what a great marriage looks like, and I think that that’s wonderful. So don’t expect fireworks between them. Expect fireworks individually that they help with.
The way the fall finale ended for Padma… I am so worried about her, but I feel like Leela’s (Anuja Joshi) text is gonna get through in time?
Maybe. Can’t tell you, but your response is the correct response. Leela loves her sister and will do anything. We are all worried. Postpartum depression is a real thing. Postpartum depression takes lives, and we want to treat it with seriousness. It can have tragic, tragic consequences, and it’s an under-talked-about medical condition in the world because nobody wants to believe that mothers can be unhappy once they’ve had children. But the truth is it’s not a mother’s fault, it’s a disease, and it’s biochemical, and it can have devastating consequences. So we’re trying to really give that idea its due on the show.
There are only 13 episodes, but you’ve also talked about future seasons, so what can you say about how the season ends because it’s shorter?
We have a great wrap-up for Billie and Cade [Kaley Ronayne], and Conrad. We have very satisfying stuff that will happen between Raptor [Malcolm-Jamal Warner] and Leela and Padma and the babies. We have a fun surprise between Devon [Manish Dayal] and Leela. And we have really powerful, strong storylines that will wrap up, [such as] Ian’s [Andrew McCarthy] addiction story, his addiction story vis-à-vis Kit, but also vis-à-vis his daughter Cade. And then a fantastic final storyline between Bell and Kit and the governor and the hospital’s fate, which will be very much in jeopardy right up until the very end.
We always knew that it was gonna be 13 episodes. There was really never any talk of more than that for this season. But we don’t know about Season 7. It’s still a possibility. We’re wrapping up the season, but not the show.
Last season had the cliffhanger of Conrad’s choice. What can you say about any type of cliffhanger this year in comparison? Around the same level? Bigger? Smaller?
There won’t be an emotional cliffhanger about Conrad; let’s put it that way. His choice will be settled by the end of [Episode] 13, and we will see him living with the choices he made and whether he’s happy or sad about them. I’m not gonna give it away, but we’ll definitely have closure on that. So there’s not gonna be a big Conrad emotional cliffhanger. If there are cliffhangers, it’ll be what is Bell’s fate, what is Chastain’s fate, and where will our doctors sort of go to live their lives? Will it be at Chastain, or will it have to be elsewhere?
Kyle (Corbin Bernsen) just came back. Are any other returning characters coming up?
There are very many returning characters, but I’m not gonna tell you who they are because that would be giving them away. I know that that sounds like I’m cheating, and I am a little bit, but if I tell you who the returning characters are, then you’ll know the storyline, and I don’t want you to do that. So yes, there are returning characters, and it’ll be big.
The Resident, Winter Premiere, Tuesday, January 3, 8/7c, Fox
