The revival series will return six original cast members, but who's not returning?
Criminal Minds is back from the dead. Paramount+ has officially resurrected the procedural drama, which ended in February 2020 following a 15-season run on CBS, formally greenlighting the revival series on Thursday.
Original cast members Joe Mantegna, A.J. Cook, Kirsten Vangsness, Aisha Tyler, Adam Rodriguez and Paget Brewster will return to reprise their characters. Showrunner Erica Messer, who oversaw the flagship series, will return to run the new iteration. Notably missing among the returning cast are Matthew Gray Gubler and Daniel Henney, the latter of whom currently stars in Amazon Prime Video's The Wheel of Time.
In the new Criminal Minds, the FBI’s elite team of criminal profilers come up against their greatest threat yet, an UnSub who has used the pandemic to build a network of other serial killers. Now, as the world opens back up, the network goes operational and our team must hunt them down, one murder at a time.
“For 15 seasons, Criminal Minds was at the forefront of cutting-edge scripted drama as it explored the psychology behind crime – thrillingly,” said Nicole Clemens, President of Paramount+ Original Scripted Series. “The series never stopped evolving during its run, and we are beyond excited to bring it back into a new era with new stories for a new generation of viewers at Paramount+. Erica, the whole cast and creative team are building a season full of new twists that we are sure will electrify audiences.”
Messer will serve as showrunner, executive producer and writer, while Breen Frazier and Chris Barbour will join as writers and EPs. Glenn Kershaw will direct and executive produce and Mark Gordon will also serve as executive producer.
The resurrection of Criminal Minds comes more than two years after its series finale, which saw Vangsness' Garcia leaving the BAU for greener pastures as the others reported for duty on a new case.
"I knew that we would never please everyone with the final hour of the TV series that had been on 15 seasons because... we didn't want to write the ending. We didn't want it to end," Messer told ET at the time. "We wanted to leave it with, they're going to go fight another case and that will be that. We just won't go with them this time. That was the overwhelming majority saying, 'Can't the show just go on?' And part of it was also, if the show ever got picked up to keep going, which, who knows if that would ever happen, we can untie that bow really easily and keep telling stories."
ET and Paramount+ are both subsidiaries of Paramount.
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