The following contains spoilers for the first episode of Criminal Minds: Evolution on Paramount+
Considering the very serious and mature subject matter of Criminal Minds and the show’s original run of over a decade and a half, you’d think there would be nothing the show had never done before. Considering how violent the show could get, even on broadcast television, it would seem that almost nothing was too much. But the new season of one of the best Paramount+ series, Criminal Minds: Evolution gives us something we’ve never seen before that was simply off-limits on CBS: FBI agents on a smoke break.
In the first episode of the new season of Criminal Minds, Paget Brewster’s Emily Prentiss discovers that the team has a new, dangerous, unsub to deal with. The news has her shaken, so she’s up on the roof of the BAU building grabbing a smoke while talking to Aisha Tyler’s character, who is so shaken by the news that she needs a cigarette herself. While the scene is played like it’s something the duo has done 100 times before, it is something fans have never seen. Showrunner Erica Messer told TVLine she tried for years to make the scene happen, but could never get it past the network. She explained…
I could never make it happen on CBS, and we tried for years, since Season 4, 5, 6…. We could just never make it work.
It’s almost humorous, but not actually that surprising when you think about it; that a scene that is so simple was so complicated to create. While smoking on screen was fairly commonplace even a couple of decades ago, over the years it has become nearly taboo. Nobody wants to be seen as promoting the activity, and so it is frequently left out of stories entirely simply to avoid the appearance of an endorsement.
Since we’ve never seen these characters smoke before, the scene may be quite jarring for fans who have been watching them for almost 20 years. At the same time, on its face, the scene makes perfect sense. Smoking is one way that people deal with stress, and chasing a new serial killer every week has to be a pretty stressful job.
Clearly, the bar for what is acceptable on streaming has been lowered a bit compared to broadcast television. This isn’t the first “taboo” that Criminal Minds has broken that has surprised Paramount+ subscribers.
The first season of the show on streaming featured the BAU’s Agent Rossi swearing, which was obviously something else we hadn’t seen on CBS. Messer believed the language made Criminal Minds more realistic. On the tamer side, the new season is also giving us a Criminal Minds romance we never got before.
While having the cast smoke together may have been a non-starter on CBS, it apparently wasn’t even a conversation with Paramount+. Messer says she simply put the scene in the episode and then it happened. The showrunner was so excited she had to thank the episode’s director for making it happen. She continued…
I just threw it in there! I was so excited. [I told Director Douglas Aarniokoski], ‘You just made a dream come true!’
The smoking isn’t the point of course. It’s an excuse to put a couple of characters in a situation where they can share a personal moment outside the office. Then once the break’s over, they have to go back to hunting psychopaths.