Criminal Minds is dragging itself back out of the grave
You ever get a line from a comic book stuck in your head? We’ve got one running endlessly in our own brains right now: The bit from the big finish of Watchmen, when Adrian Veidt begs his god-friend Doctor Manhattan to tell him it all worked out, “in the end.” “Nothing ends,” Manhattan replies, half a smile on his lips. “Nothing ever ends.”
Anyway, they’re bringing back Criminal Minds.
This is per The Hollywood Reporter, which notes that the extremely long-lived CBS procedural—which lasted for 324 episodes, three leading men, and enough “unsubs” to negate the output of untold numbers of Subway sandwich franchises—is being revived for Paramount Plus, a.k.a. the former CBS All Access. And really, we have to applaud the company, and series showrunner Erica Messier, for their restraint, in that it’s been two whole years since the show finally went off the air and entered into the endless Valhalla of TNT rerun syndication. That’s a long time to go without feeding the public’s insatiable need to see serial killers serial kill a couple of people, and then get serial caught.
Reported earlier this week, the news of the potential Criminal Minds revival comes just as CBS also announced that it’s taking the radical step of killing off a single one of its tesseract of NCIS shows, presumably because there must be balance somewhere in the universe. The show’s revival is somewhat unexpected, though, in that the last major news about the Criminal Minds empire was fairly fraught, i.e., that the show and its producers were being investigated by the California government in relations to allegations of sexual harassment and other illegal behavior against its long-time director of photography, Greg St. Johns, who was fired from the series in 2018. On the other hand: Serial killer printer go BRRRR.
The Criminal Minds reboot is only one of several procedural offerings being dragged out of the grave of late, with a CSI reboot also in the works, and a docuseries, The Real Criminal Minds, also being assembled for Paramount Plus. No word on which, if any, of the original show’s various stars will be returning for go-around number 325.