Niecy Nash on The Rookie Spinoff, Don’t Forget the Lyrics and Marriage

Emmy nominee Niecy Nash is in prime time: she’s currently hosting the Fox game show Don’t Forget The Lyrics and gearing up to star in a spin-off of the ABC hit The Rookie.

“We were coming out of such a difficult time with the pandemic and everything, and I was like, ‘What a great way to give people a ton of money for just doing what they’re doing when they’re headed to Work or get in the car in the shower,'” Nash, 52, told the Post about “Don’t Forget the Lyrics”.

The series airs Mondays (8:00 p.m.) and follows contestants as they test their musical memory for a chance at a $1 million prize. For Nash, who married musician Jessica Betts in 2020, there was also an additional element that appealed to her.

“My better half could be there [the ‘Don’t Forget The Lyrics’] band, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, can I flirt while I’m at work? This is the dream!’” Nash said. “We had a good time and we never tire of being together. You drive to work together, then you work together all day. Some people would say, “That’s enough,” but I don’t, I say, “Give me more!” ”

This is the third iteration of “Don’t Forget the Lyrics,” which aired from 2007-2009 (Fox) with host Wayne Brady and was in syndication from 2010-2011 with Mark McGrath handling hosting duties. Nash said she was a fan of the show before it was her turn to host, but she’s not sure how well she would do as a contestant.

“My genre would be ’90s R&B, I think I could do pretty well with that. The other categories not so much,” she said. “And in terms of specific songs, I don’t know because one of my favorite songs is ‘Pony,’ which is the one they played on the ‘Magic Mike’ soundtrack. And I thought I knew all the lyrics to it and found out I’ve been singing that song wrong for years. So you can never tell.”

Nash, an industry fixture for years (“Reno 911!”, HBO’s “Getting On”), was a regular on all four seasons of TNT’s “Claws” and earned an Emmy nomination for her role in Ava DuVernay’s 2019 series Miniseries “When You See Us.”

“For some people, the journey is bigger later, and I guess I’m just one of those people,” she said. “I’m having a very good time. I’m actually living my best life, and it doesn’t matter that it happened later in life – it just matters that it happened.”

It’s also an area where she can relate to her character in The Rookie: Feds, a spin-off of ABC’s The Rookie, in which Nash played Simone Clark in Season 4.

Airing Tuesdays at 10 p.m. this fall, The Rookie: Feds follows Simone, a single mother and oldest rookie training for a role at the FBI.

“Simone Clark experienced what you would call ‘a postponed dream.’ But she never lost sight of it,” Nash said. “And so, at 48, she has a small window of opportunity to graduate from the FBI training academy and says, ‘I’m going to make my dream come true.’ It will be so much fun watching their journey. It is on this journey that you correct course and have a new experience, but you already have so much life experience. She gets in big trouble because there are two ways of doing things – the FBI way and the Simone Clark way – and they’re not the same.

“But she gets out of trouble because she still gets it done in the end.”