Jensen Ackles was back on the small screen over the summer of the 2025 TV schedule, but not for another return to the world of Supernatural or The Boys. He stars in the action-packed Countdown, hailing from Chicago Fire creator Derek Haas and also starring Grey's Anatomy's Eric Dane, Jessica Camacho, Violett Beane, Elliot Knight, and Uli Latukefu. The drama is just days away from the Season 1 finale thanks to Countdown releasing episodes weekly instead of all at once to binge. Now, after the penultimate episode, Ackles' comments about how Countdown compares to his other projects and needing viewers to "care" are paying off.
I was fortunate enough to speak with Jensen Ackles and the rest of the Countdown team earlier this summer before it was available to stream with an Amazon Prime Video subscription. Having seen Ackles in Supernatural, The Boys, and even Big Sky, I asked how he would pitch the show to somebody who knew him best from other projects. At the time, he shared:
If I'm speaking to people who have seen other shows that I've done, I would say if you liked the action, the suspense, the comedy, the drama, and you liked all of that blending into one show, this has all of that. It may not have a genre element to it, per se, but it certainly is high stakes, high action, and there's a lot of character development too. And I don't think you get a lot of that, we've spoken about that, that maybe a lot of these procedurals, you don't really get to peel back layers of these characters from their personal perspectives, and we get to do that in this show.
There are no literal demons in Countdown like he faced on Supernatural, and certainly no "Herogasm" event like what happened on The Boys, so Countdown is a departure from the genre projects that Ackles is best known for. The high stakes were clear from the start, however, and the penultimate episode of Season 1 ending with the identities of the task force members exposed to a killer sets the stage for a dangerous finale. The actor went on to share what he and showrunner/creator/writer Derek Haas (formerly of several shows in the Dick Wolf TV universe) talked about before making the show:
Derek and I talked early on, and I said, 'Listen, the audience has to care about these people if we're going to ask them to go on this journey with us.' That was an important thing to him and to me and to Eric and to everybody involved. We had to make sure that the audience cared about these characters in order for them to really join this journey. And I think we did that. I think that was certainly a tent pole in what we built here I think that that translates, probably from some of the work that I've done in the past, and there's a lot of elements, I think, that you'll find in this show that I've gotten to play in the past.
Admittedly, casting and then killing off Milo Ventimiglia was a pretty great way to immediately make audiences care about the show, with so many TV fans loving him for his work on This Is Us. But as somebody who has watched a lot of crime TV shows in my day, I wasn't entirely sold on whether the show could make me deeply care about the characters. Enjoy the action and adventure? Sure.
The cliffhanger at the end of Episode 12 last week was enough for me to realize that, yes, I've somehow become a lot more invested in the survival of the characters that I'd realized. Even though the episode ended without anybody's life in imminent danger or explosions or bullets flying in the final moments, the cliffhanger was enough to get me on the edge of my seat ahead of the finale.
Most of the task force was lured into a situation by a killer who could predict their every move, and their lives are in serious danger now that he knows who they are. Not every member was there, but given that this is a show that has killed people off in the past, not much seems off limits for the finale. Do I think it'll be a blood bath with most of the characters dead? No, but I'm invested in finding out. Congratulations to Jensen Ackles and Derek Haas, because mission accomplished at least with me – I care about these people.
The first twelve episodes of Countdown are available streaming with a Prime Video subscription now, with the Season 1 finale releasing on Wednesday, September 3. Derek Haas didn't debunk the possibility of a second season when we spoke earlier in the summer, so we can only wait and see if Jensen Ackles and Co. return for a Season 2. That assumes everybody survives the upcoming finale, anyway!
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