Last year, it was announced that Criminal Minds would be getting a revival at Paramount+, and now, Deadline is reporting that contract negotiations are finalizing for Joe Mantegna, Kirsten Vangsness, A.J. Cook, Adam Rodriguez, Aisha Tyler and Paget Brewster to reprise their roles from the original series.
Criminal Minds, the CBS procedural that followed the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit as they hunt serial killers, came to an end in 2020 after an impressive fifteen season run. The revival is said to be dropping the procedural format and instead will see the team tackle just one case across a ten-episode season. Of the six stars set to return, Vangsness and Cook are the only two to have been with the show since the first season. Brewster joined the series in the second season, Mantegna in the third, Tyler in the eleventh, and Rodriguez in the twelfth, but all were a part of the team for the final season.
However, not all the stars from the final season are coming back. Daniel Henney, who first stared in the spin-off Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders and then joined the main show as a regular in the thirteenth season, is presumably not returning for the revival as he now busy staring in the Prime Video series The Wheel Of Time. Additionally, Matthew Gray Gubler, who has been with the show since the first season, is not returning because he has publicly said he is ready to move on from playing Spencer Reid after fiteen years.
According to Deadline, the six stars’ contracts are being held off from finalizing until a deal is struck with Erica Messer to return as well. Messer worked on the original show from the start and served as writer, producer, supervising producer, and executive producer throughout its run. She also became the show’s co-showrunner in 2010 before becoming the sole showrunner in 2011, staying in the role until the show ended in 2020.
The show’s cast and Messer were reportedly first approached about the possibility of returning ahead of the official announcement in February 2021. However, with so much time between announcements, fans began to get worried that the revival would never happen. The was until Nicole Clemens, President of Paramount+ Original Scripted Series, gave an update in a TCA executive session, saying, “We are still very much in development on Criminal Minds. We’ll have more to share on that soon but it is alive and well.”
Now with this new update with the cast, Criminal Minds fans might just be justified in getting their hopes up on seeing the revival.