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The reunion of the BAU has officially been extended. Paramount+ renewed Criminal Minds: Evolution for a second season on Thursday, its return day from its midseason and winter break. But it might be that Criminal Minds has been renewed for a seventeenth season.
See, Criminal Minds: Evolution was promoted as a sequel series akin to CSI: Vegas, but has instead been posted to the unsubtitled show’s Paramount+ page as season 16. Should the show even retain its Evolution subtitle after this season? It’s got its evolution already (following its 2005-2020 original run on CBS) in its serialization as a streaming series. Is it going to keep evolving into new formats and kajigger its running time more? The chief programming officer of Paramount Streaming, Tanya Giles loves the show and has expressed great investment in the series. Paramount+ has stated Evolution is one of its “top five original series”. and the overall franchise has seen an increase of nearly six times in month-over-month viewership.
This season has the BAU’s top profilers going up against Elias Voit, an UnSub who cultivated a broader network of serial killers over the course of the pandemic, making him, as he's touted “their greatest threat yet”. Played by Zach Gilford, the character was driven by an obsession with death, he was previously an operations analyst for a global cyber-security firm. It brought back Joe Mantegna as Rossi, Paget Brewster as Prentiss, A.J. Cook as JJ, Kirsten Vangsness as Garcia, Aisha Tyler as Tara and Adam Rodriguez as Luke.
With four episodes left in the season, whether it's the first or sixteenth, dropping weekly, it is set to conclude on February 9. Season two or seventeen will go into production within the year.