‘Happy’s Place’ Boss on Setting Up Bobbie & Emmett’s Future Romance With Finale

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Happy’s Place Season 1 Episode 18, “Alarm Bells.”]

Happy’s Place may be ending for the season, but it’s going out with a bang of sorts as the finale installment, “Alarm Bells,” sets the stage for romance between Bobbie (Reba McEntire) and the titular bar’s in-house cook, Emmett (Rex Linn).

As a real-life couple, McEntire and Linn certainly have the right chemistry to make this pairing work, and while Bobbie’s sister Isabella (Belissa Escobedo) encourages the arrangement, the rest of the Happy’s Place team works against it, claiming at first that Bobbie and Emmett could never be a thing before admitting the duo are definitely into each other.

The fear is that allowing Bobbie and Emmett to get together, could upset the balance of the team’s metaphorical ecosystem. But what sparks the debate, to begin with? When security concerns are raised at Bobbie and Isabella’s place, Emmett offers to help, but Bobbie’s stubbornness leads to a competition of who is a better protector.

When they turn to a shooting game at the local arcade, viewers get a peek into the simmering romantic tension as Emmett attempts to teach Bobbie how to shoot in the game. While no declarations are made, nor dates scheduled, Emmett asks if he can look in on Bobbie to make sure she’s safe from time to time, the implication being that he’ll be dropping in for visits here and there at her home.

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With a second season to look forward to, showrunner Kevin Abbott notes, “The season finale was always going to be about that relationship,” but he adds that in the original vision he had in mind the romance “was going to be further than this.”

Instead, he’s holding it back for future episodes, and Abbott teases that it’s something “I actually love, that I don’t think anybody’s going to see coming… So that’s coming up in Season 2.” As for exploring this romance between Bobbie and Emmett, Abbott, who previously collaborated with McEntire on Reba, acknowledges that she may have had her relationships on that series, but that they were often failures.

“For whatever reason, Reba can do almost anything, but she couldn’t do that,” Abbott says of her onscreen relationships in the previous show, “and it used to bug the heck out of me.”

Now with Emmett, there’s a chance viewers could see longevity in their relationship. “Before we had [cast] Rex, I had incorporated Emmett as a possible love interest for Bobbie, hoping… and then when Rex came into the picture it was [like] maybe this is the key we’ve been missing all along.”

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As Abbott puts it, “The sparks you see in the season finale for me are just delightful and wonderful.” But when it comes to mixing work and real life, he admits, “There’s a certain amount of trepidation… [but] right now it is working marvelously, the two of them. Rex could not be more fun to work with.”

According to Abbott, Linn is quite different from his curmudgeonly onscreen persona as Emmett as he says “[They] are not the same character at all. Emmett’s a man of few words. Rex will talk your ear off and he is just this lovely man who’s not grouchy or anything.”

Bobbie has Isabella to thank for the romance because, without her intervention, she’d still be dancing around the idea of Emmett rather than facing him head-on. “Isabella’s role is to open her up, to make her take risks,” Abbott says of the character’s purpose of widening Bobbie’s scope of the world.

Likewise, Bobbie is meant to provide Isabella with a home base support. “They will each feed something important in the other, and we’ll get into a lot more of that in Season 2,” Abbott promises. Stay tuned for updates on Season 2 as it takes shape and let us know what you think of the Season 1 finale in the comments section, below.

Happy’s Place, Season 2 Premiere, TBA, NBC