The third season of Criminal Minds: Evolution (and 18th season of Criminal Minds overall) is currently releasing new episodes for fans with a Paramount+ subscription, and the long-awaited return of Matthew Gray Gubler as Spencer Reid isn’t all that viewers can celebrate at this point in the 2025 TV schedule. The crime drama has already been renewed for another season, and the behind-the-scenes photo that reveals who survives Season 3 has me excited for more reasons than just being guaranteed more of these characters.
Paramount+ renewed Criminal Minds: Evolution for Season 4 before Season 3 even premiered, and a new photo has been released to show a very happy cast celebrating getting back to work. Take a look, as long as you don’t mind being spoiled on who will be back for the next round of episodes:
Unless somebody is coming back as a hallucination like Voit last season before his big bloody cliffhanger, these are the characters who will survive the Season 3 finale: Joe Mantegna, Aisha Tyler, Kirsten Vangsness, Adam Rodriguez, A.J. Cook, Paget Brewster, and Ryan-James Hatanaka. Will they all emerge fully intact?
Not necessarily for Tyler’s Tara Lewis, Rodriguez’s Luke Alvez, Cook’s JJ, and Brewster’s Emily Brentiss, considering that parts of their bodies are obscured in the photo, but I don’t think these poses were chosen because anybody had an arm amputated at the end of Season 3. It’s fun to speculate, though, since confirmation of who will be back doesn’t exactly spoil the rest of the 2025 episodes.
I have my favorite characters of the Criminal Minds family, but seeing them on board for Season 4 isn’t what really got me excited. I’m just used to streaming shows taking overly long breaks between seasons, ranging from Bridgerton to Stranger Things. (I’m really, really missing Stranger Things.) Despite releasing on Paramount+ and taking advantage of the streaming freedoms for F-bombs and gruesome twists not possible on CBS, Evolution has more or less been releasing with the usual hiatus length of a network TV schedule.
Season 2 ended in August 2024, and Season 3 kicked off in May 2025. With Season 4 production starting before Season 3 even finishes releasing episodes, I get the sense that we could once again go months instead of years between the third season finale and fourth season premiere. As somebody whose bread and butter as a television journalist is often crime dramas and procedurals, the prospect of a quality drama like Criminal Minds releasing annually is something major to celebrate.
The same seems to be true for HBO Max’s The Pitt as well, with filming on Season 2 expected to start soon for an intended premiere in January 2026. Could this be the start of a trend for streaming shows to release on a more regular schedule rather than taking long breaks a la Wednesday?
Only time will tell, but the guarantee of Season 4 should make Season 3 of Criminal Minds: Evolution less stressful than if the future was still uncertain. New episodes release on Thursdays on Paramount+, with all fifteen seasons of the original CBS series available on the streamer as well.
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