Late last month, the show’s executive producer Erica Messer is still hoping that the American police-procedural TV series “Criminal Minds” will be renewed for Season 11 by the CBS network.
After less than three weeks, CBS confirmed the show for its 11th season, giving the loyal fans and televiewers of the series another reason for their almost uncontrolled excitement.
However, it seems that Season 11 will be radically different from the past seasons due to the likely absence of lead actress Jennifer Love Hewitt and co-star AJ Cook in the upcoming season due to their pregnancies, reports Christian Today.
While JJ, the character played by AJ Cook in the series, was able to announce to the team under the Behavioural Analysis Unit (BAU) during the series finale for Season 10 that she will be going on a maternity leave, having known her pregnancy already then, Jennifer’s case may be a bit different because she got pregnant after the Season 10 series finale.
Jennifer Love Hewitt’s character in the series, Kate, is an important and integral part of the show so the showrunners really need to be creative in allowing her to skip a full season without killing off her character.
There is a possibility though that AJ and Jennifer might return on the latter part of Season 11 and appear in a few episodes but chances are, they might likely skip the entire year and just come back for Season 12, quite confident that “Criminal Minds” will extend beyond its 11th season.
Not sold to the idea of killing off characters
Unlike most TV series of its genre, the people behind “Criminal Minds” does not like killing off characters.
Erica Messer said that the production team likes people to come back and play whenever they can so they don’t just kill them off.
In order not to highlight too much the absence of Jennifer and AJ in the upcoming Season 11 of “Criminal Minds,” the production team will bring back familiar faces from previous seasons to keep up with its ‘revolving door’ system of bringing in and out new agents that are normally played by guest stars.
She also added that the team is also happy for both AJ and Jennifer, although they were caught by surprise in the latter’s pregnancy but in a good way. She said that none of them really thought at the beginning of Season 10 that there would be two pregnant cast members at the end. While it is too soon to talk about Season 12, they will definitely be bringing back Jennifer Love Hewitt if the show is renewed for its 12th season in 2017.