This is an exciting time in the 2025 TV schedule to be a fan of CBS' Watson, the freshman doctor/detective drama that quickly joined Justin Hartley's Tracker as a Sunday night hit. One episode is left this spring, as the show will wrap its two-part finale on May 11 before starting summer hiatus. Well, with just days left before the second half of the finale, CBS has confirmed when Morris Chestnut's series will be back, and I'd say it puts an added twist on what showrunner Craig Sweeny and actor Peter Mark Kendall told CinemaBlend.
As part of CBS' 2025-2026 schedule announcement, the network revealed that Watson will once again be absent from fall premiere season and instead arrive as a midseason premiere. If the schedule is similar to the first season, that could mean the first episode of Season 2 around late January to mid February. There's no precise date just yet, but now we officially know when to expect John Watson and his whole team of doctors back: early 2026.
That is, if we assume that the entire Season 1 team of doctors makes it to Season 2! Prior to the first half of the finale two-parter, Ingrid's future at the Holmes Clinic seemed like it was the most in jeopardy after an ultimatum from Mary, but "Your Life's Work, Part 1" changed all that. Both of the Croft twins are currently approaching death's door, and the team seemingly only has the resources to save one of them. (You can stream Part 1 with a Paramount+ subscription now.)
The extra note of tragedy coming out of Moriarty engineering diseases specifically to the DNA of the doctors? His target was only Adam, and Stephens is now in danger simply due to sharing DNA with his twin. (Peter Mark Kendall plays both twins.) When I spoke with the creator/showrunner, Craig Sweeny weighed in on raising the stakes so high before the second half of the two-parter:
It's wonderful [to get to do]. When you get to the point of a season finale, whether it's playing out over two parts or one part, as a writer, things kind of burn along with a slow fuse. And then you get to go bang! [laughs] In this finale, we really got to go bang. So it's just great. It's both the plot mechanics of what Moriarty has been up to and the emotional through lines just all come to a climax simultaneously. It's so nice to get to write finales. 10 out of 10, would recommend.
After learning why Craig Sweeny cast Randall Park as Watson's big bad and then seeing the first half of the finale, it's easy to understand why the villain's plan qualifies as – to quote the EP – "scientifically accurate but also very scary way that feels like science fiction." At this point, nobody is this scarier for on Watson than the Croft twins.
I can admit that Watson successfully had me convinced that one of the twins might die in the first half, with the brothers bonding and Stephens coming up with a surprisingly lovely take on death and the first law of thermodynamics. While I was fortunately wrong that anybody was dying in Part 1, the team may be one the verge of deciding which of the two is going to have to perish. Peter Mark Kendall is in the unique position of not necessarily being killed off the show even if his character is killed, by virtue of playing both twins.
Kendall explained what it was like to perform both halves of that very emotional conversation before Adam fell into a coma in the previous episode, saying:
I think that what served me the best was there not being so much time to overthink it. Making TV, making a procedural on a network is so hard, just because it moves so quickly. I think the exhaustion of it and the intensity of the schedule kind of didn't allow me to overthink things. It was really, really fun to show Stephens in that moment maybe occupying a different role that he hadn't played before, as the more comforting brother who takes care of the other. So it was really, really fun to see how these characters change throughout the season, but also in this very, very intense two-episode block of how they change from from beginning to end.
Whether there will be a happy end to this two-parter remains to be seen, although at least fans can count on the show itself coming back for Season 2 in the 2025-2026 TV schedule. The team has the immediate problem of the ailing Croft twins to deal with, as well as the macro threat of Moriarty out there, potentially with the means to strike any or all of them down as well.
For his part, Peter Mark Kendall didn't spoil the fates of his character(s) in the finale, but he did make sure to credit the man who has worked as his on-set double on Watson for when the brothers have scenes with each other. The actor said:
We had a really great guy named Riley Orr, who is the Croft double. It's a very kind of Herculean task of learning all the lines for both, learning all the blocking, showing up to do exactly what I have to do each day, and we couldn't do it. The process doesn't work without him. It's a big task, and we had someone who was great for it.
Fortunately, the wait to find out who will still be around to return for Season 2 isn't much longer. The second half of the Season 1 finale event, called "Your Life's Work, Part 2" airs on May 11 at 9 p.m. ET on CBS, and it's a safe bet that fans won't want to miss it. Just check out the promo below:
As for Season 2, Watson will return to Sunday nights in early 2026, but episodes will air at 10 p.m. ET instead of 9 p.m. ET, with the Yellowstone spinoff Y: Marshals taking the earlier slot after Tracker. Watson will therefore inherit the time slot formerly held by Queen Latifah's The Equalizer, which was cancelled after five seasons just days before its season finale.
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