The Rookie has given us some genuinely inspired comedy pairings over eight seasons, but there’s one that the show has somehow, inexplicably, left sitting on the table like an untouched plate of food at a party.
Skip Tracer Randy Spitz and Officer Quigley Smitty have never shared a case, and every single episode that goes by without fixing that is a missed opportunity of almost criminal proportions.
Think about what the show already had in The Rookie Season 8 Episode 11 alone.
Randy returned to Mid-Wilshire with his accent knocked clean out of him after an incident that, knowing Randy, probably involved at least three questionable decisions made in rapid succession.
Tim, in an act of either supreme confidence or temporary insanity, made Smitty Watch Commander for the day and spent the rest of the episode marveling at the sheer engineering behind Smitty’s laziness.
The man taped a photo of himself to the camera to fake his way through Zoom meetings while napping at Tim’s desk.
Now imagine both of them on the same case simultaneously.
Nolan and Tim would age ten years in a single afternoon, and we’ll love every single second of it.
Randy Would Run the Investigation Into the Ground, and Smitty Would Nap Through the Landing
Randy Spitz, in his own words, is a lethal weapon in four states and the territory of Guam.
He once lost a hundred-million-dollar bitcoin fortune because he forgot a password, but somehow kept finding his way back to Nolan’s cases like a golden retriever who’d learned to pick locks.
Randy didn’t just walk into situations; he detonated them, and the debris radius was impressive even by The Rookie’s chaotic standards.
Smitty, on the other hand, has spent twenty-plus years perfecting the art of doing the absolute minimum with maximum efficiency.
He claimed to be allergic to paper to avoid paperwork and misfiled months of evidence in The Rookie Season 8 Episode 4 because he couldn’t be bothered to read a memo about the new logging system, nearly torpedoing one of Lucy’s court cases in the process.
He once walked an inmate to the bathroom alone during a power outage, got jumped, and lost his gun, turning a bathroom break into a full department manhunt.
In Episode 11, he taped a photograph of himself to a camera so it looked like he was attending Zoom meetings, and then spent the day sleeping and snacking at Tim’s desk.
Tim’s exact response to discovering this was pure bewildered admiration at how much effort Smitty puts into being lazy, which was somehow the most Smitty sentence ever spoken on this show.
Put these two men on a case together, and the operational breakdown would be something to behold.
Randy would be sprinting toward every danger in seven wrong directions simultaneously, generating leads nobody asked for and dragging the case into jurisdictions it had no business touching.
Smitty, meanwhile, would be somewhere nearby doing the bare minimum required to technically remain present, possibly napping in the patrol car with a photo of himself taped to the window.
Every few minutes, Randy would burst back in with new information that somehow made everything worse, and Smitty would wake up just long enough to shrug before going back to sleep.
It was a perfect storm of incompetence, and The Rookie has been sitting on it like a gold mine it hadn’t gotten around to digging yet.
Nolan and Tim Cleaning Up This Disaster Would Be the Best Thing on Television
Nolan has been managing Randy since The Rookie Season 2, which meant he has developed a very specific set of coping mechanisms for dealing with someone who operated outside every recognized boundary of professional conduct.
He’d watched Randy get shot by a biker gang and bounce back cheerfully, witnessed Randy publicly announce a five-million-dollar bounty on a kidnapper because waiting for the police felt inefficient.
Nolan has developed the thousand-yard stare of a man who had accepted that Randy is simply a force of nature, like a hurricane or a very enthusiastic golden retriever, and that the best you could do was minimize the property damage.
Tim, separately, has been dealing with Smitty for most of his career, and his approach is entirely different.
Where Nolan tried to redirect Randy’s energy, Tim tended to look at Smitty with the quiet, resigned expression of a man who had made peace with something a long time ago and wasn’t going back to revisit it.
Tim, along with the rest of the department, marvels at Smitty’s dedication to laziness with frustration, but with something closer to grudging respect, the way you respect a professional at the peak of their particular craft, even if that craft is avoiding work.
Putting both men on the same case would require Nolan and Tim to split their attention in two completely irreconcilable directions at the same time, which was exactly the kind of situational comedy The Rookie specializes in.
Imagine Nolan sprinting after Randy, who has already inserted himself into a negotiation nobody authorized him to conduct.
Tim arrives at the scene to find Smitty technically present but somehow also asleep, and an important piece of evidence goes missing because he can’t be bothered.
The Rookie has always been at its funniest when two wildly different energies collide inside the same episode, and it has two of its best comic characters waiting patiently in different corners of Mid-Wilshire for someone to finally point them at each other.
Alexi Hawley, if you’re reading this, consider it a formal request. We’ll even watch Smitty tape a photo of Randy to the camera to cover for him. Actually, Randy would probably do that himself.
Which disaster do you think would cause more damage on a joint case: Randy’s overactiveness or Smitty’s legendary laziness? Drop your vote in the comments and tell us how you think Nolan and Tim would survive it.
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The post The Rookie Needs to Put Skip Tracer Randy and Smitty Together on a Case! appeared first on TV Fanatic.