In the set photo that arrived with the news, all seven leads of “Criminal Minds: Evolution” stand shoulder to shoulder in the BAU’s office, arms around one another, with Kirsten Vangsness and Aisha Tyler laughing at the camera. It is a cheerful picture to attach to an ending. Season 20 will be the show’s last, it is due in 2027, and Paramount+ has not announced a premiere date. The news arrived on Friday, October 30th, along with first-look photos from the final batch of episodes, and the caption on that group shot says it was taken on the set of Season 20.
The wording differs from outlet to outlet. TVLine’s headline says the show has been canceled and Deadline’s report speaks of an official cancellation. Variety and TheWrap say it is ending, which is closer to the language in showrunner Erica Messer’s statement, where she says she is “suddenly navigating the end of this chapter” and talks about sharing Season 20. Deadline’s own first line says the run is ending “for now”, a phrase Vangsness later pointed to herself. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the Season 19 finale of “Criminal Minds: Evolution.”
Season 20 will be the show’s last, it is due in 2027, and Paramount+ has not announced a premiere date.”
The finale, which closed Season 19 in July, wrote Elias Voit (Zach Gilford) out of the BAU’s daily life. According to TV Insider, Voit covers for his daughter after she kills a killer called The Fan, and he is put away in an undisclosed high-security federal penitentiary. Rossi (Joe Mantegna) closes the book on him, TV Insider adds, by finishing a book about Voit and raising a wine glass to an empty chair. Messer told TV Insider that Voit will not be in Season 20 and that the story skips ahead, since, as she puts it, “by the time you come into Season 20, it’s been a year”, with everyone meant to be a year further along as people. The finale had also ended on a fresh case, with body parts delivered anonymously to FBI field offices in five cities, but Messer said in the same interview that case gets solved offscreen to make room for the jump.
What stings is that the season is already in the can. Deadline reports that Season 20 wrapped production earlier this fall, so it will not give fans a proper ending. TVLine adds, as speculation, that the team could reshoot some scenes before 2027 to create a new one if Paramount+ gave the go-ahead. That would be a different send-off from 2020, when, TVLine notes, CBS gave the creative team one more season to wrap up storylines, and TVLine says it is unclear whether Paramount+ gave the “Evolution” team the same heads-up this time. In July, Messer told TV Insider that Season 20 was still being written and that she expected to shoot its finale in September. Deadline reported on September 2nd that Wayne Brady and Selma Blair would guest star in the eighth episode while the season was in production, so cameras were still rolling weeks before the news broke.
The reasoning comes from Deadline, though only through sources. Deadline hears that the decision was made recently, making it the first official cancellation for the new Paramount+ leadership team under Casey Bloys. Deadline’s sources say the call came on the recommendation of the previous regime, which had given the show an early Season 20 renewal in March. The series was still in Paramount+’s Top 10, Deadline adds, so the choice may be tied to cost or to the nature of a broadcast-style series on a streaming service, though that reading is Deadline’s own. Deadline also recalls that Jane Wiseman, Paramount+’s former Head of Originals, said in August that she and her team were “big fans” of the show and open to more series in that mold. Deadline adds that she has since exited in the wake of the merger. None of it comes from Paramount+ itself, and Deadline takes Messer’s statement as a sign that the decision was sudden and likely unexpected.
The cut lands on a show that, by some measures, does not look weak. TVLine says the series re-entered Nielsen’s top 10 of most-watched streaming series during Season 19 and calls it “an undeniable hit with staying power.” Deadline’s framing is structural. Deadline calls the show the last of its kind on Paramount+ after the service’s continuations of “SEAL Team”, “Frasier” and “NCIS: Tony & Ziva”, and it notes that HBO Max, now a Skydance sibling, has a model for series like “The Pitt” that borrow broadcast’s larger orders of 15 episodes a season. Whether the BAU is a casualty of a new strategy or a leftover of an old one might depend on which of those measures Paramount+ weighed.
The cast has answered in short, public lines. A.J. Cook shared a cast photo with the words “These people own my heart forever and always”, and she posted another photo on Halloween of herself holding a tombstone for JJ with the caption “Rest in peace JJ (for now)”. Paget Brewster posted a photo of herself with the words “Free Agent”, Tyler added “Family for life” to a cast photo from RJ Hatanaka, and Hatanaka captioned his own post “Just the finest group of people” with a heart emoji. Vangsness, who plays Penelope Garcia, said in an Instagram video that the show is being canceled and compared the moment to the part of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” where Charlie gets the chocolate and it turns bittersweet. She added that Messer says there are “so many more stories to tell”, and that she would love to keep telling them “somewhere” if the chance comes. In the comments, Bleeding Cool reports, she wrote that she found out “like 90 min before you did”, which fits the word “suddenly” in Messer’s statement.
The history explains why this ending feels like a second goodbye. “Criminal Minds” aired on CBS from 2005 to 2020, ran more than 300 episodes over 15 seasons, and gave rise to “Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior” and “Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders”, two shorter-lived spinoffs. Paramount+ revived it in 2022 as “Criminal Minds: Evolution”, more serialized, with story arcs spanning a full season of 10 episodes against 22 or more for most of the CBS run, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Joe Mantegna, A.J. Cook, Kirsten Vangsness, Aisha Tyler, RJ Hatanaka, Adam Rodriguez and Paget Brewster are all set to return for Season 20, TheWrap reports.
Season 20, for now, is still mostly a mystery. Deadline’s description of the eighth episode, the one Brady and Blair appear in, has the BAU in Los Angeles chasing an UnSub who targets people tied to the skincare industry while Tyler Green (RJ Hatanaka) stays behind with his nephew. Messer told TV Insider the season’s focus is “probably” Rossi, who is “hit really hard” by events early on. Messer adds that the clash between Rossi and Garcia in Season 19 will return in Season 20 when “tempers flare” under pressure. Mantegna told TV Insider in July that what he would like for Rossi is “a romantic relationship that has some legs” and that he felt “very confident” about what the team was doing on Season 20. Paramount+ has given only the year 2027 for the premiere, and all 19 seasons of “Criminal Minds” and “Evolution” are streaming there now, according to TheWrap. Whether another home picks up the BAU is unknown, and Vangsness’s “somewhere” is a hope and not a plan.
What Do You Think? Is a final season that was shot without a planned ending a fair send-off for the BAU, or should Paramount+ let the team reshoot something before 2027? Which member of the team do you most want to see get the last big case? And if Vangsness gets her wish, would you follow “Criminal Minds” to another home?
See you on the next binge!
