All good things must come to an end. The Resident has been canceled at Fox after six seasons.
Viewers have said their final goodbye to the doctors and nurses at Chasten Memorial Hospital, the network revealed on Thursday, April 6. The series, which premiered in January 2018, followed Matt Czuchry as Dr. Conrad Hawkins as he faced personal and professional challenges while fighting for his patient’s health. Bruce Greenwood (Dr. Randolph Bell), Manish Dayal (Dr. Devon Pravesh), Malcolm-Jamal Warner (Dr. AJ Austin), Jane Leeves (Dr. Kit Voss), Jessica Lucas (Dr. Billie Sutton), Anuja Joshi (Leela Devi) and Miles Fowler (Trevor) also starred.
Season 6, which finished airing in January, was down 27 percent in ratings in its major demographic from 2022 and 69 percent from the show’s premiere season, which was comprised of only 13 episodes. At the time, executive producer Andrew Chapman told TV Insider that he likely wouldn’t know the show’s fate until April or May.
“[We] really thought hard about how we would construct storylines that would give closure to the season, but if it had to be a series finale, would give our audience and our fans some closure to the whole series, too,” Chapman explained to the outlet.
In August 2021, news broke that Emily VanCamp — who starred on the series as Dr. Nic Nevin — was leaving the show after four seasons. In the second episode of season 5, Nic suffered a brain injury from a car accident that ultimately took her life. VanCamp, 36, ultimately returned for the season 5 finale in May 2022 to wrap up her character’s story line.
“Because so much of the season thematically had been about grief and loss and coming to terms with mortality and how Conrad is moving on from his relationship with her and the time jump and being a single dad with Gigi, it felt like the right thing to do,” Chapman explained during an interview with ET Canada at the time. “We reached out to her and she was super excited to come back. She had not had a chance to say goodbye to everybody on the show, the crew, all the other actors.”
He continued, “The beginning of the season, we knew that we were going to lose Emily in this season, but we didn’t know when we were going to lose her. We lost her in episode 3 and we really had to scramble, and it didn’t give us the closure of the relationship that we had wanted,” he shared. “We thought we were going to have her for a couple more episodes and it wasn’t anybody’s fault. She had a medical issue and she had to deal with it, and we fully understood. But we really didn’t get to close the loop with her, so to speak.”
The cancellation of The Resident comes days after Fox ordered a new medical drama, titled Doc, straight to series for the 2023-24 season, per Variety. The show will focus on Dr. Amy Elias, Chief of Internal and Family Medicine at the fictional Westside Hospital in Minneapolis, as she navigates her life after a brain injury erases her memory of the last eight years. She must face an unfamiliar world where she has no recollection of patients she’s treated, colleagues she’s crossed, the soulmate she divorced, the man she now loves and the tragedy that caused her to push everyone away.
