Criminal Minds' final season didn't want to stray far, but a musical episode was briefly considered

Entertainment Weekly

The CBS police procedural wrapped up 15 seasons Wednesday night, and showrunner Erica Messer says she and her writers considered some "crazy" out-of-the-box ideas for the 10-episode final season. "Yeah, there was crazy stuff thrown out in the room, and we didn’t just shoot it down," Messer tells EW. "We would say, 'Okay, how could that happen?' The idea of a live episode or… what do you call it?… a documentary film crew following the crew around. We ended up exploring some of those, but ultimately we weren’t able to find a way to keep it true to the series. A musical would just take you so far out, that we just didn’t know if that would be the right way to go or not." Asked about the potential musical episode, Messer adds: "I mean, somebody brought it up for our final 10. 'Do we do a musical?' We were like, how in the world would we do it? And I think the idea was gone by the time we ordered lunch but we did think about it. It’s a classic! You have to think about it for a second, right? But we didn’t want to go too far off the beaten path in the show’s final run. There were a couple of episodes that we thought, 'oh, let’s just make this 100 percent from the unsub’s point of view.' But then you’re never really seeing the team. I mean, we loved the idea. We all sort of rallied around it but then said, 'Wait, this is the final 10 hours of this show. If you have one of those hours where you’re not seeing all of our favorite people on the screen, fans are going to feel like they’re getting cheated out of an hour of our team.' And so while I think that would have been a great idea to do some other season, it didn’t feel like the right time to do it in our finale season. So we took a kernel of that idea and made an episode around that."

ALSO:

• Showrunner Erica Messer on filming the final scene: "That was a sad night but sadder when watching it than while shooting it, but super sad when they all got in the elevator and the doors closed on them"
• Messer says "we had to get down to the nitty-gritty" in deciding which villains to bring back
• Messer says it was "really hard" deciding which flashbacks to use in the series finale
• See the Criminal Minds cast then and now