After fifteen seasons and 324 episodes, the long-running crime procedural series Criminal Minds came to an end in 2020… but it didn’t take long for rumblings of a revival to emerge. That revival has taken the form of Criminal Minds: Evolution, and Paramount+ have released the first trailer for the upcoming series.
Criminal Minds: Evolution sees the return of Joe Mantegna as David Rossi, Adam Rodriguez as Luke Alvez, A.J. Cook as Jennifer “JJ” Jareau, Aisha Tyler as Tara Lewis, Paget Brewster as Emily Prentiss, and Kirsten Vangsness as Penelope Garcia. This time around, the Behavioral Analysis Unit will be going up against “their greatest threat yet,” a network of serial killers who have been recruited during the pandemic by Elias Volt (Zach Gilford), an operations analyst at a global cybersecurity firm with a dark side and an obsession with death.
While speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Criminal Minds showrunner Erica Messer teased how the team has changed since we last saw them. “We’ve got Prentiss, who has now been promoted outside of the BAU unit chief. She has a new position where she oversees dozens of units. Rossi has taken her place as unit chief, but he’s going through a big thing. So he’s kind of in all five stages of grief when we meet him in the first two episodes. We will learn why by the end of the first hour,” Messer explained. “Alvez [Rodriguez] has been trying to help out raw scenes, sort of stay local for a while and handle those cases, while JJ [Cook] and Lewis [Tyler] have answered every single consultant call that they’ve gotten in the last year, which means plenty of nights away from home and living on the road. The word from above, the bureaucrats, is, ‘Do more with less.’ I think we can all relate to that as well. Our teams have been downsized and everybody’s still got the same amount of work to do.” As you can tell from the Criminal Minds: Evolution trailer, not every member of the team has returned as there’s no sight of Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler) or Matt Simmons (Daniel Henney). Messer said that their characters haven’t gone away and hopes that they could return at some point.
The first two episodes of Criminal Minds: Evolution will debut on Paramount+ on November 24th, with CBS also broadcasting the first episode at 10 p.m. ET on the same day.