Why Is ‘The Resident’ Not Airing on Oct. 26? Here’s When the FOX Medical Drama Returns
The Resident Season 5’s Halloween episode, “The Thinnest Veil,” brought an unexpected twist, but fans will have to wait a few weeks to see how the twist unfolds. FOX will not be airing a new episode of The Resident on Oct. 26; new episodes are expected to return in early November. Why is the medical drama taking a hiatus? Here’s when fans can expect to see Chastain Park Memorial Hospital’s doctors on their TV screens again, plus what the next episode will hold.
[Spoiler alert: The third section of this story contains some spoilers for The Resident Season 5 Episode 5, “The Thinnest Veil.”]
A new episode of ‘The Resident’ will not premiere on Oct. 26
The Resident will take some time off the air on Oct. 26 to make room for the World Series baseball games. FOX is one of the major cable networks airing the World Series annually, so it doesn’t come as much of a surprise to see them put a hold on weekly shows for the sports event.
In fact, FOX has already paused The Resident for the World Series before. In 2019, the medical drama went on a two-week hiatus from mid-October to early November in favor of showing two World Series games.
According to FOX News, Game 1 of the World Series 2021 will begin at 8:09 p.m. on Oct. 26, around the same time The Resident usually begins.
When will ‘The Resident’ return to its regular schedule?
The Resident’s return date all depends on the results of the World Series. A team needs four wins to win the World Series, so if that happens before Game 6, the event will end, and The Resident will return on Nov. 2. However, if the World Series continues into Game 6, FOX will push the medical drama back again. At the latest, The Resident should return on Nov. 9.
In the meantime, fans can take this time to catch up on any missed episodes. They’ll definitely want to be caught up before tuning into episode 6 because some significant changes are on the way. All episodes of The Resident Season 5 are available for streaming on Hulu.
The FOX medical drama will look very different when it returns
The Resident’s hiatus may only be for a week or two, but it’s going to feel like years. That’s because the next episode, season 5 episode 6, will pick up with a three-year time jump. Viewers caught a brief glimpse of this at the end of episode 5, where Conrad Hawkins (played by Matt Czuchry) entered his daughter’s room to find a 3-year-old Gigi getting ready for Halloween.
Speaking to Entertainment Tonight, showrunner Peter Elkoff explained that they chose a three-year jump to give Conrad time to mourn the death of his wife, Nic Nevin (Emily VanCamp).
“Conrad losing Nic is a terrible tragedy, and we felt like if we were going to tell a true story of grief, it would last for a really long time. And I don’t think we wanted to spend multiple episodes, 10, however long it takes for a man to lose the love of his life and the mother of his 9-month-old child,” Elkoff said. “We felt like we would play the loss and the grief and the, ‘What the hell just happened?’ for a couple of episodes, and then do the time jump so we could find Conrad recovered, on the brink of, ready for whatever new version of his life there would be.”
Elkoff added that when season 5 returns, the employees at Chastain will be leading different lives. Fans will even see some new characters, including an ER doctor named Cade. He said:
When we come back in [episode] 6, everybody’s lives will have changed in different ways. Within the hospital and outside the hospital, our characters will be living differently than they did in episode 5. We felt like emotionally, the characters have changed some; someone’s point of view towards someone else might be different. We’ll have a new romantic couple within the story at episode 6 after the time jump. Then in episode 7, we have a new character, a doctor, who’s going to come in and really stir things up.
New episodes of The Resident premiere on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. on FOX.
