The Rookie's Eric Winter Teases Tim's Mother's Arrival and an Action-Packed Rest of Season 8

[Warning: This story contains spoilers for The Rookie, Season 8, Episode 7, "Baja." Read at your own risk!]

Eric Winter has now played Tim Bradford — the hard-charging LAPD sergeant and recently promoted watch commander — on The Rookie longer than he has played any other character in his near-three-decade career. But eight seasons and more than 140 episodes into his tenure on the ABC police procedural, Winter insists that he remains creatively excited and fulfilled by the continued evolution of Tim's personal and professional lives.

"The things that are exciting to me are Tim's growth in this new job title, job description — how he's going to navigate being in charge of so much while also still trying to be the same leader he's always been. But he just has to adjust his style at times, a bit differently," Winter tells TV Guide over the phone. And after getting back together and moving in with Melissa O'Neil's Sgt. Lucy Chen at the start of Season 8, Tim is now having to adjust to a new lifestyle after he clocks out at work.

"Even if you had a bad day, the baggage is now coming home, and you're having to unwind with your partner and explore letting things go and working through things together and navigating the household together," Winter adds. "A lot of that within the relationship side is going to be fun to explore. And then you have my family getting more involved, and now I'm in a much more serious situation with my partner. So now, what does that look like from the family perspective?" (More on Bradford's family a little later.)

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In an interview with TV Guide following last month's premiere, creator and showrunner Alexi Hawley explained that he chose to promote Tim to watch commander — the supervisory position long held by Lt. Wade Grey (Richard T. Jones), who is now working as part of a joint LAPD-FBI task force to capture international criminals — as a way to "shake things up" for the officers who have been with the show from the outset.

Given that Tim "had a strong leadership role in the military," Winter believes that his character "has always wanted to" take on a more senior role within the precinct and organization. "But I don't think he anticipated what it would actually entail at that level within the department," he says. "I often say he's a guy that likes to be in the action, that wants to make an impact in the streets. And when you're assuming this role behind a desk, dealing with the department politics, dealing with the higher-ups, you're just not in that space as much anymore. I think that's kind of the fun of him navigating, how does he get back in there? How does he make a difference, but also stay true to his new job title?"

On the personal front, Winter believes that Tim is also a different person than he was during his first attempt at a relationship with Lucy. "I think he's becoming more open to personal change and development, a little less stuck in his ways. He's trying to learn how to be more forgiving and understanding," he says.

"As much as that affects him in his personal life, [he's realizing] how that is going to also translate in his work life, because now that he has this bigger leadership role and he's overseeing the department on a larger scale, he has to have some of the [same] empathy and understanding for these rookies and people making mistakes," he adds. "So I think we're seeing a lot of that change, not just in the personal life, but how it translates into his job. With the personal growth, he's obviously softened up a lot over the years, but it's fun to see him still be a hard-ass at work while balancing that sort of new personal twist."

The confluence of the personal and the professional is particularly evident in Monday's episode, which finds Lucy and Nyla (Mekia Cox) going undercover in Baja, Mexico, to investigate the violent deaths of two young American women who were smuggling drugs across the Mexican border into Los Angeles. Tim has always struggled with the idea of his partner leaving him to work undercover — his first wife Isabel developed a secret addiction to narcotics, which led to the eventual break-up of her marriage to Tim; and Lucy is no stranger to dangerous, isolating work for months on end — but Tim reluctantly agrees to sign off on Lucy's new mission with Nyla.

"I think he's definitely still conflicted, but he's trying harder to approach it in a different way. Especially being this bigger boss of the department, he's understanding that his team's going to have to make certain sacrifices and do certain things," Winter says of Tim's reaction to Lucy going undercover again for at least four weeks. "He's got to learn to really put that personal [stuff] aside while also allowing her to grow in her profession and help her achieve those things that make her such a good cop. So I do think that's some of the fun that we're seeing with her going undercover again. And, of course, he's still nervous deep down, but he has to shield it even more, I think."

Tim, naturally, still finds a way to see his girlfriend in passing during the op. At one point in the episode, Tim and Angela (Alyssa Diaz) appear undercover at a fast-food restaurant whose parking lot is being used as the point of exchange for Lucy and Nyla — who are pretending to be a lesbian couple living out of a camper van — to hand over the cheap drugs they smuggled over the border to the drug dealer's contact in L.A. Angela is disguised as a patron of the restaurant, while Tim pretends to be an employee who briefly checks in with Lucy and Nyla as they go through a drive-through window. (For what it's worth, Winter says he had "zero input" into that ridiculous fast-food worker costume: "I was kind of surprised when I saw that myself. I was cracking up. We were all making fun of it. It was quite the look!")

In the end, Lucy and Nyla are able to apprehend not only the drug dealer but also the good-natured caravanner who first greeted the undercover officers at the trailer park. The caravanner admits that he is actually a spotter for a rival gang, tasked with stealing the drug packages the cartel smuggled into the country using the girls as couriers. While the caravanner was attempting to rob them late one night in L.A., the young women managed to rip off his mask, and he felt he had no choice but to murder them to protect his cover. With the case closed, the officers are finally able to return home — Nyla has a tender reunion with her husband and daughter at the station, and Lucy enjoys a sweet moment in bed with Tim toward the end of the episode.

Tim and Lucy will have to answer some potentially uncomfortable questions about their relationship when the former's mother unexpectedly shows up in next week's episode, titled "Grand Theft Aircraft." For the last few years, Winter has pleaded both publicly and privately with Hawley to explore Tim's relationship with his mother. In fact, in an interview with TV Guide following the Season 6 finale, Winter even laid out how he thinks the introduction of Tim's mom could work for the character.

"Going into next season, I've pitched that I would love to meet my mom. I feel like Tim probably has a great relationship with his mom, and that was his rock in the family that kept him from completely going off the edge," Winter said in May 2024. "Maybe we could even bring his sister [Genny, played by Peyton List] back, and that could be a thread. She and Lucy got along really well, so that could be a lifeline, an olive branch of 'Come hang with my sister, and you never know where that goes.' And let Mom hype me up!"

Winter may have finally gotten his wish, but he was "surprised" to see the dynamic that the writers gave him to play. "I always believed that he had this stellar relationship with his mom, and it was just his dad that he struggled with. And we're going to see that it was not all rainbows and butterflies with his mom either, that some of the struggles that he had with his dad obviously bled over into the relationship with his mom and how that [influenced] his upbringing," Winter reveals.

"So it wasn't as pretty or as sweet as I thought it was going to be when I met [Tim's] mom. It's a lot more complicated, and he has baggage he needs to work through with his mom," he adds. "I think you can credit the relationship with Lucy essentially to helping him understand how to navigate it and to be open to [those conversations] and not just close down and run away from the problems."

Given that this is the first time anyone will be seeing Tim's mother (whose name has not even been revealed yet), viewers will immediately gain some insight into where Mama Bradford has been all this time — and what kind of relationship she has with her children.

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"The way [the episode] kind of is set up, I would believe they've talked and they communicate, but it's not like they're as close. It's not like they talk all the time or they're up to speed with each other on a regular basis," Winter explains. "So I think he's caught by surprise when she's in town and she's meeting Lucy, and he's forced to share with [his mom] where the relationship is at and then navigate for the first time talking through their family baggage. So it definitely feels like they haven't connected in quite some time in a real way."

But how will the two most important women in Tim's life really feel about each other? "There's a little bit of tension. I think [there are] definitely strong personalities," Winter responds. "My mom has a very strong personality, for sure. I think Lucy is as well, and she cares a lot about me and has done a lot of work to try to help me be a better person, and I think she's protective of that. So her navigating with my mom on how to continue to build on it, versus [the risk of] letting me sort of close back up, causes that tension."

At the end of last season, Tim asked Lucy to move in with him because they had spent so much time apart after their break-up, and he did not want to waste any more time in re-establishing their relationship. The first third of Season 8 has offered a fun glimpse of Tim and Lucy navigating the growing pains of cohabitation, with the couple now having settled into a very comfortable intimacy at home. But while introducing a romantic partner to their future in-law is a big step forward for any relationship, Winter does not think Tim has allowed himself to entertain the thought of proposing to Lucy — at least not yet.

"I think at this stage he's still adapting to having this partner live in the house with him and what that looks like, what it feels like. I think he loves it, but I think it's definitely a step of him opening himself up in that way again," Winter says. "I do think he realizes this is something he doesn't want to screw up, and he wants to continue to build on it and [he knows] it's real, but I don't know if he's really thinking at this moment super down the road yet."

For now, The Rookie fans can expect a particularly heart-racing remainder of the season. "For Tim in particular," Winter teases, "there's a lot more great action and getting him back out on the street because I think we get more of that later in the season than we started with."

The Rookie now airs Mondays at 10/9c on ABC. Episodes stream the next day on Hulu.