Steven Spielberg & Cole Hauser’s 32-Episode Version Of The Rookie Deserves To Be Revisited

Published Oct 6, 2026, 11:30 PM EDT

Sean is a senior writer for ScreenRant and has been writing about new TV releases since December 2023. He has received multiple advance screenings of popular shows and ideated his own coverage read by hundreds of thousands of readers.

Sean is a self-published author of a Western novel. Sean has also written award-winning opinion pieces related to local politics while getting his Bachelor's degree in journalism.

Over 22 years before Nathan Fillion's The Rookie, Steven Spielberg and Yellowstone's Cole Hauser collaborated on a police procedural that serves as the blueprint for the newer show. While Steven Spielberg is best known for his movies, the legendary director also has a prolific history as an executive producer for television. In fact, Spielberg helped make some of the best TV shows ever, like Band of Brothers and The Pacific.

Meanwhile, Cole Hauser is best known for playing Rip Wheeler on Yellowstone and, more recently, the Yellowstone spinoff series Dutton Ranch. For decades before his rise to Western fame, however, Hauser was a great character actor who appeared in a few classics like Dazed and Confused and Good Will Hunting. Most interestingly of all, Hauser and Spielberg worked together once, on ABC's High Incident.

Nathan Fillion's The Rookie is getting the flowers it deserves. It has great reviews, impressive viewership numbers, and The Rookie season 9 is already well underway. Nothing can take away from The Rookie's success, but the show does owe a debt of gratitude to High Incident. At the very least, it's worth revisiting the often overlooked collaboration between Spielberg and Hauser in light of The Rookie's achievements.

High Incident Is The ’90s Version Of The Rookie On ABC

It's remarkable how similar High Incident is to The Rookie. High Incident follows uniformed police officers of the El Camino Police Department, a fictional stand-in for Los Angeles, California. Across its two seasons, High Incident charted the early days of rookie cop Randy Willitz (Hauser) as he was trained by his superiors and helped respond to crimes, emergencies, and other high-intensity calls from around the town.

While High Incident doesn't have the additional hook of its rookie cop being a middle-aged man, it's clear to see how The Rookie drew inspiration from it. Both are police procedurals that focus on uniformed officers responding to (mostly) everyday calls rather than detectives solving murders. Both are set in southern California, more specifically towns based on Los Angeles. Both follow rookie cops being trained by their senior officers while on active duty. Both shows even take a "ride along" approach to their format and follow the officers both on and off duty.

The only significant difference between High Incident and The Rookie, other than the age of its characters, is when they take place. High Incident is undeniably a product of the 1990s, both in terms of the social commentary it makes and the way the police are portrayed in general. The Rookie has much more modern sensibilities, but both shows offer a keen insight into the police officers shows don't generally follow. High Incident is like if John Nolan took a time machine back to 1996.

Steven Spielberg Created High Incident Alongside Law & Order’s Eric Bogosian

One of the biggest draws of High Incident is, of course, the collaboration between Cole Hauser and Steven Spielberg. However, that's not the only interesting collaboration in the show, as Spielberg also co-created High Incident with Eric Bogosian, who plays Captain Danny Ross on the original Law & Order and later Criminal Intent. So, on top of having a legend of film and television in Spielberg, High Incident also boasts a legend of police procedurals in general.

Bogosian's time with Law & Order also bleeds into High Incident. Like the earlier show, High Incident takes a hard-nosed approach to, well, law and order and depicting it on screen. Both shows are heavily interested in realism and showing the struggles of law enforcement and how they interact with the communities they serve. In short, if you like The Rookie or Law & Order, there's a good chance you'll like Steven Spielberg's forgotten series, High Incident.