NBC Renews Rodriguez’s “The Night Shift” for a Second Season

Freddy Rodriguez won’t be coming off the night shift anytime soon…

NBC has ordered a second season of its summer series The Night Shift, starring the 39-year-old Puerto Rican actor.

Freddy Rodriguez

The series, in the back half of its eight-episode first season, will feature more episodes next season, with NBC bulking up the second-season order to 14 episodes. No scheduling was announced.

Rodriguez plays the exceedingly complex Michael Ragosa, the nighttime hospital administrator charged with keeping the budget balanced and the resident bad boy doctor in check, on The Night Shift, which is the No. 1 new scripted series on broadcast television so far this summer in the key 18-34 demo and total viewers, with a 1.7 rating and 7.9 million viewers.

It’s tied for 12th place among broadcast primetime shows in the demo and ranks No. 4 for the summer among broadcast networks in overall audience.

Originally ordered as a midseason show in spring 2013, the series got pushed to this summer. Back in April, The Night Shift exec producer Jeff Judah insisted he loved the idea of his big ensemble medical drama running on the broadcast network in the summer.

“There are not as many shows on the networks,” he told reporters at NBC Press Day. “It may not get lost as much, maybe get a chance to be seen by more people — we love it.”

The Night Shift, about the men and women who work graveyard at San Antonio Memorial, got its series order as part of a four-show deal between NBC and Sony Television.

Judah has a pal who’s an ER doctor in Atlanta who regales him with stories about his work that are “heartbreaking” and “funny,” about people who often are drunk or high and about the “adrenalin junkies”  who work in the ER on the night shift. “It gives our show more of a blue-collar feel,” he said.

The Night Shift is set in San Antonio, rather than a major market; in the series, the hospital ER serves 22 counties and must often get medical care to someone via helicopter. “We wanted to bring the ‘golden hour’ to the patients — to bring the military aspect of the show,” Judah explained back then.