‘On Call’ Team Breaks Down Finale Betrayals & Share Hopes for Season 2

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for On Call Season 1.]

There are a couple of blindsides in the On Call Season 1 finale, which does a great job of setting up hopefully more to come.

First, Harmon (Troian Bellisario) is surprised when she doesn’t get a position she’d been hoping for — and the person who keeps her from doing so is not the one she expected. Then, her rookie, Diaz (Brandon Larracuente), finds out that his future’s going to look a bit different than he thought.

Below, stars Bellisario, Larracuente, Eriq La Salle (also an executive producer and director), and Lori Loughlin, and executive producers Elliot Wolf and Tim Walsh break down the finale (streaming now on Prime Video) and tease what could be ahead, should the show be renewed.

Bishop’s betrayal of Harmon

Harmon is all ready to transfer over to Koyoma’s (Rich Ting) drug team, only to find out that someone has denied it — and while she thinks it’s Lasman (La Salle), blaming her for his partner’s termination, it turns out that it was Bishop (Loughlin). She went off book in her attempt to get justice after Delgado’s (Monica Raymund) murder, Bishop explains, and she put her rookie’s life in danger. Any other lieutenant would fire her.

That was “such a shock” for Harmon, Bellisario tells TV Insider. “[For her], it had to be Lasman. We called each other after we read [Episode] 8, and were just floored. Brandon was like, ‘I cannot believe that you deny my thing.’ And I was like, ‘I know, but I cannot believe that you run after Leona, and I cannot believe that I’m denied.’ We were just sort of gobsmacked by [Episode] 8.”

Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Morris

She adds that it was “wonderful” and “unexpected” to have Harmon and Lasman now on the same side. “Like he says, ‘We have to be shoulder-to-shoulder. I, in fact, protected you. I am here for you. Even though we have a history, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’ve got each other.'”

But Bellisario does understand why Bishop did what she did. “That’s what’s fascinating about it, because as mad as I can be as Harmon about being denied, she’s like, ‘You’ve got to be more strategic. You cannot do that.’ And so I think what was great about it is that Harmon is dealing with the real world consequences of getting justice for Delgado,” she says. “She wanted justice for Delgado so badly that she went off the book. She did things that even she knows were wrong. She was operating in a gray area, but and she endangered her rookie. He agreed, but I was willing to make these sacrifices, to take these risks in order to achieve something, and now I have to deal with the consequences.”

For Loughlin, that reveal just shows how interesting these characters are. “They’re very complex, and there’s a lot we don’t know about them.” She hopes that those stories can be told in “many seasons” to come.

Did Bishop give up Lasman’s partner?

Harmon tells Diaz that Lasman’s partner went too hard on a suspect and she pulled him off, then he shoved her, and then he was fired for it. The people who tried to cover it up were left go, too. Lasman lost his promotion to lieutenant (Bishop got it instead). Harmon never filed the complaint, but with the investigation sealed, people blame her. After that reveal about Bishop stopping Harmon’s transfer, could she also have been involved in what happened with Lasman’s partner?

Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Morris

“That’s a future season,” is all Wolf will say. “We hope that you’ll help spread the word so that we can tell that story in Season 2.”

Does Lasman think that’s a possibility now? According to La Salle, his character’s not the type to dwell.

“Bishop getting the promotion over him, it is what it is,” he shares. “When you’re in certain positions, you can’t be petty. I think you compromise the machine if you’re petty. And so look, I wanted a promotion. Some stuff happened. I didn’t get the promotion. I show up to work saying, you’re the boss. I follow your orders. Does it hurt deep down sometimes? Yeah. I don’t think Lasman sits around and, ‘What’s the conspiracy theory?’ or blah blah, blah. ‘I have a job to do. This is my boss. And we all have the responsibility of protecting lives and protecting communities, and I think we both take that very seriously and we don’t have time to be petty in the process because that’s not going to help anything.'”

Adds Loughlin, “No matter what these relationships are or how we go toe to toe or come up against each other, at the end of the day, we are protecting each other. We have to have each other’s backs.”

La Salle agrees: “And we would take bullets for each other. This is a kind of cool thing. We can get into an argument or have a disagreement with any of the characters, and yet we take a bullet for that character. That’s to me, good storytelling.”

Harmon’s decision about Diaz’s future

Diaz makes some calls throughout the first season that lead to Harmon recommending that, since he keeps running into dangerous situations and ignoring orders, he should be dropped back down to Day 1 and restart his probation.

“We knew we wanted their dynamic to continue,” explains Wolf. “We also put a lot of effort into making this show feel grounded in how a police department actually works. So from that standpoint, we talked with a bunch of folks and found a way to keep them together. And then the trick of doing that actually on the page when we wrote the episode was for it not to come across like that was our intention. It has to come across organically. The dynamic between these two is the heart of the show and that’s the real arc of the season.”

The season ends with Diaz once again riding with Harmon as her rookie (she requested it). And by the time he gets back in the car with her, he does understand why she did what she did, Larracuente says.

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“Anybody who has ambition for life and wants to move up the ladder, no matter what profession you work in, you want to get that stamp of approval. And Diaz almost feels like he takes it personal because he feels like he failed in a way. As somebody who’s such a go-getter and is so motivated by setting goals for himself, I think that feels like a personal attack,” he notes. “But to your point, I think Diaz, before he gets back in that car, processes, she did this for my own wellbeing, and am I going to embark on these next however many days of being under a microscope again with her? The fact that he chooses to get back in the car with her, I think, is because he knows that at the end of the day, despite her decision to move him back, she actually cares for his wellbeing.”

Walsh agrees that the tow have “a newfound respect for each other” at the end of the finale, adding, “She has a respect for him regardless of knocking him back, considering what he went through and he survived getting shot. And I think he’s got a good enough head on his shoulders to understand why she did what she did.”

The evolution of Harmon and Lasman’s relationship

Harmon and Lasman, after going head-to-head a lot throughout the season, end at a place of understanding. The EPs are hoping for a second season to explore what that looks like because it’s easier said than done.

“We’re not a messaging show. We don’t set out to have a message, but really, if you want to look for a message, it’s two people from opposing points of view can come together for a common goal. And their common goal is to protect the community and they put all of their other bulls**t aside,” says Walsh. “I think it’s a very powerful message for where we are at really in our own country.”

We see them put aside their issues during the most heartbreaking call of the season, in Episode 6 in which Lasman steps up to shoot a dog who was hit by a car since animal control will take hours.

“We wanted to chart the evolution of their relationship,” according to Walsh. “We wanted you to think it’s one thing in the beginning that he’s gunning for her and then we slowly wanted to reveal that actually he’s not a bad guy, he’s a good guy. They just have differing philosophies and they need to figure out how to work together.”

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That call came out of a ride-along Walsh did involving a hit-and-run with a dog. “They didn’t shoot the dog, but the officer I was with told me a story that they actually do that if a dog is suffering and they can’t get animal control to come out — I don’t know if they do that anymore, but within the last couple of years, they still would put the animal out of its misery. And we both just thought, I mean it doesn’t get any more dramatic than that,” he explains.

Adds Wolf, “And also emphasize the decision making that they have to make on a day-to-day basis. I think that the toughest and most intriguing part about patrol is to expect the unexpected. You never know what call is next, the mundane or the life-altering. And that was heartbreaking. And to Tim’s point, the officers that told that story were heartbroken by it, but ultimately there’s a sense of duty there in a rule book.”

What could happen in a Season 2

The EPs are hopeful there will be more of the Prime Video series. “We left some threads,” Walsh points out. “The fentanyl trade that Smokey was involved in, that’s still out there hanging out there for us to take. And then just all really the character stuff, quite honestly, that we want to explore more deeply in Season 2. That’s really the focal point, is the two leads.”