‘Criminal Minds’ Revival Officially Ordered at Paramount+ — Who’s Returning?

It’s official: The BAU is coming back, this time on Paramount+.

It was only February 2020 when Criminal Minds wrapped its 15-season run on CBS, and a year later, Paramount+ announced that it would be reviving the procedural drama with a 10-episode series in which the team investigated “a single, fascinating case.” Now, it is officially happening, with TVLine reporting that the streaming service has ordered the revival to series. Returning for the 10 new episodes are Joe Mantegna (David Rossi), Paget Brewster (Emily Prentiss), A.J. Cook (Jennifer “J.J.” Jareau), Kirsten Vangsness (Penelope Garcia), Adam Rodriguez (Luke Alvez), and Aisha Tyler (Dr. Tara Lewis).

The confirmation comes the day after Mantegna shared a photo of himself on the beginnings of a very-familiar looking set on Twitter. “Just doing a little inspection today for an upcoming project,” he wrote, along with the hashtag for Criminal Minds.

When the BAU was last seen, Rossi, Prentiss, Dr. Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler), JJ, Luke, Tara, and Matt Simmons (Daniel Henney) were still working as profilers to hunt down UnSubs. (Gubler and Henney aren’t returning for the new series.) Garcia had left the FBI for nonprofit work, so we have to wonder if she’s back at the FBI full-time or gets pulled back in for a case. Plus, will she and Luke be together? And will we find out what was written on the note Garcia left her replacement? Chances are no, for that last one, since executive producer Erica Messer told TV Insider after the original series finale, “We’re never going to say. We want that to be whatever you want it to be.”

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We also can’t help but wonder if anyone’s been promoted in the time between the end of the original series and the revival. After all, “it is really unusual for anyone to stay in one position in the FBI in the BAU for that long without trying out running a field office in another city or maybe just being in a different division,” Messer noted after the finale. “So Prentiss possibly being nominated as the first female director of the FBI, that’s something I’d like to see happen in the next five years. I feel like that would be amazing. If this show was still on, that’s maybe how we would’ve gone with Prentiss. For JJ — certainly capable of running her own field office somewhere, but so much is tied to her family — it would only make sense for her to do that if it made sense for her family to make that move. Rossi’s still going to be consulting. [He’s] never going to give it up, and they’ll be lucky to have him and have his brains still working on cases.”

Criminal Minds, TBA, Paramount+