As John Nolan (Nathan Fillion) joined MidWilshire in The Rookie Season 1 as the oldest rookie the LAPD had ever seen, he was accompanied by two other rookies with whom he had been in the academy.
Officer Jackson West (Titus Makin) and Officer Lucy Chen (Melissa O’Neil) made Nolan feel less lonely when everyone thought he was insane for becoming a police officer this late.
The three rookies went through training together. They supported each other when the going got tough, which was constantly so.
Jackson was one of the few Black gay male characters on television then. His father was a police commander, and Jackson wanted to prove that he could also become his own man and a successful police officer despite coming from a cop family.
Sadly, viewers never saw him blossom like his counterparts because he was killed in the Season 4 premiere. That egregious decision resulted from a series of mistakes the show made with him.
Why Jackson Was Killed Off in ‘The Rookie.’
The show decided to kill off the character from Makin’s decision to exit the series. The departure was not the smoothest, with showrunner Alexi Hawley addressing Makin’s departure in passing.
In a broad interview with Entertainment Weekly about his character’s arc at the time, Makin revealed that being a Black man in America, playing a police officer presented some serious cognitive dissonance.
“It was a bit of a bigger situation than I was able to fully describe at that time. Because it starts back for me, even just playing a cop in the first place, which was a hurdle [with] where I’m from and how I viewed the cops growing up. To play one, I already was wrestling with, ‘Oh man, people are gonna think I’m Team Cops.’ And the reality was I was struggling,” he said of his character.
And even though some of his concerns were addressed in the show, the final straw was George Floyd‘s murder at the hands of a police officer in 2020. Makin added:
“But even more so recently when we were about to come back for season 3, with everything that was happening in the press that we were seeing, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, all those things going on. It really helped me find a voice within myself that I think a lot of people are finding right now.”
After Season 3, Makin decided to leave the series, and his character was killed off.
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Why Killing off Jackson Was the Show’s Worst Mistake
A character like Jackson does not appear regularly on TV.
Jackson was a courageous Black gay man who approached everything with grit and zeal, even when the odds were stacked against him. He even survived a racist cop at too much emotional cost.
Yet Jackson never felt adequately integrated into the show. Nolan and Chen were given more screen time, while Jackson’s arcs were an afterthought.
It is very telling that Makin had to ask for the creative team to recognize that Jackson was a Black police officer.
Jackson’s romantic arcs felt underbaked and underexplored. One of his longest relationships was with Gino Brown (Cameron J. Armstrong), yet it never felt like they were together. They would mostly be seen at work arguing about something or the other.
Jackson and Gino would later break up. The show later tried to give him a love interest, but that also never went anywhere.
It is common for actors to ask to leave TV shows, but killing the character off seldom feels justified.
Even if the actor is not returning, having the character move away is always acceptable because it gives them a decent ending while communicating that they won’t be part of the story anymore.
Killing off Jackson contributed to the ‘Bury Your Gays’ trope, which has been overdone. And that from a show with one token gay character makes it even worse.
The Rookie has not attempted to replace Jackson’s character with one or two gay male characters years after Jackson’s death. It replaced him with Aaron Thorsen, a black male, but not gay.
It’s past time the show tried to address this mistake.
The Rookie airs on ABC and is available to stream on Hulu in the US.