Criminal Minds Boss on the Episode 1 Scene That Took 10+ Years to Make Happen: ‘It Just Feels So Real to Me’
The following contains a slight spoiler — specifically, the nature of Gold Star — for the season premiere of Criminal Minds: Evolution.
You’ve come a long way, Criminal Minds.
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Not long into the Criminal Minds: Evolution season premiere (now streaming on Paramount+), BAU team leader Emily Prentiss returns from a solo tour of clue gathering to report back that “Gold Star” — the mysterious entity with which serial killer Elias Voit (fatally) baited FBI Deputy Director Will Bailey — is not a thing but a person. A very deadly person.
In other words, “a seasoned UnSub.”
It’s heavy news to deliver, so Prentiss (played by Paget Brewster) first breaks it to Dr. Tara Lewis (Aisha Tyler)… during a rooftop cigarette break.
The way in which which the ladies slip off to sneak a smoke, as if they’ve done so many (if any) times before, was as random as it was conspicuous for the onetime broadcast drama. (As a recent Vulture piece noted, even TV shows set in smoking-friendly eras, such as Palm Royale or Stranger Things, seldom serve up Marlboro Moments.)
Detailing the cigarette scene’s origin, Criminal Minds showrunner Erica Messer tells TVLine in the video above, “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.”
But with the crime drama’s move to streaming — away from the restrictions of broadcast-TV standards and practices — Emily and Tara were free to light up.
“I just threw it in there! I was so excited,” says Messer, who adds that during filming, she just had to tell director Douglas Aarniokoski, “‘You just made a dream come true!'”
Dealing with this Gold Star reveal — mere weeks after the Elias Voit/Sicarius drama of last season — over a pair of Virginia Slims (or whatever) “just feels so real to me,” Messer explains.
Messer says that at first, it was just Prentiss needing a nic fix, but Tyler improv’d Tara’s bumming of a cig.
As Tyler herself tells TVLine, “Prentiss is under such intense pressure, trying to navigate these issues, that she’s up there smoking. And the news is so bad that [Tara is like], ‘I have to smoke, too!'”
After all, when working a job where people often get “chopped to bits,””Everyone once in a while you’re like, ‘Ah, holy s–t man. I’ll take a cigarette, too,'” Tyler notes. “It was a nice moment between the two of them.”
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