Criminal Minds: Evolution Showrunner Erica Messer On Bringing The Show Back To Life – Exclusive Interview

You’ve been with the show since its inception. How do you keep things fresh after 16 seasons?

It’s not as hard as you think. My general rule for the UnSub stories is to keep it real, simple, and scary — believing that this could happen out there, not that it necessarily has happened, but that it could. Those are the things that scare me, and I think that they scare a lot of our fans as well.

Over the years, we’ve had so many different writers. We did the math once, and it was 40 writers or something [who] have worked on “Criminal Minds” over the course of the series. You have all those different perspectives, all those different people bringing their truth to a story, including the vulnerability of, “This is what really scares me, and I want to write about it.” When you have that diversity in a room with different storytellers, you’re going to keep it fresh without even trying because you have these new voices.

Then this season, Breen Frazier, who’s incredible, and Chris Barber, also amazing, have been with me. Breen and I have worked on “Criminal Minds” together for years, and Chris joined us on the last couple of seasons, and the three of us have been on from the writer’s room through production. We’ve been the architects and the interior designers of this season, coming up with a framework with the whole team of writers.

You include a lot of diverse voices. You embrace their ideas, and that keeps it fresh. I don’t think it’s any secret. It’s embracing others’ perspectives and giving them a safe place to feel like they can share those perspectives.

The move to Paramount+ has allowed the series to be a little darker and a little more gruesome. Has there been anything on Season 16 that was too dark or gruesome to run with?

I’ve been big on not wanting the Paramount+ version to feel like “Criminal Minds After Dark.” I didn’t want us to all of a sudden be unrecognizable. I feel like whatever you imagine is going to be worse than anything I could show you, so I will pull back. There are some things you had to see — you had to see that spinal [incision] to get the impact of it, but you didn’t see him actually cutting; you just saw the guy’s reaction.

Those kinds of things, while it’s gruesome and feels a little more real in some ways — like these UnSubs are killing themselves, which feels very visceral — I didn’t want us to be unrecognizable. We joke that our show has ages 12 to 112 watching us. So even with the [foul] language, it’s there but we didn’t want to be gratuitous with that either. When it feels appropriate to drop something more than “damn,” then we do it. But we didn’t want to all of a sudden sound like “The Sopranos.”