Will Thomas Gibson Kill ‘Criminal Minds’?
Episodes of Criminal Minds begin and end with quotes from some historical personage, intoned soberly by a cast member to give the show’s latest slice-and-dice killings a patina of classiness. Right now, I’m wondering if Thomas Gibson is thinking about a quote from novelist John Hobbes that his character, Aaron “Hotch” Hotchner, uttered during a Season 4 episode: “Men heap together the mistakes of their lives, and create a monster they call destiny.”
There are a couple of reasons the firing of Thomas Gibson is a big show-biz story. It’s rare for the star of a show as popular as Criminal Minds to be whisked off-screen so abruptly. It’s also disorienting to the show’s fans to confront what may have been the reality behind a character that was presented as a solid, sensible man. Viewers bring to a TV show everything they know about the person onscreen — what they’ve heard about his personal life as well as the character he’s portraying, and for Gibson, the disconnect was starting to jar. There was a reason why Gibson was cast in his first TV star role, opposite Jenna Elfman’s whimsical fruit-loop in Dharma & Greg: Gibson was a perfect contrast — he projects stolid Protestant rectitude. Paste a beard on him and clap a stovepipe hat on his head, and he’d pass for Abraham Lincoln. That quality carried over onto Criminal Minds; will his departure fatally weaken the show’s core?
There’s no doubt CM will make Gibson’s Hotch disappear in a brisk, professional way — that’s what a well-oiled network TV show is built to do: replace defective parts and move on. But will the series survive that departure?
Related: Thomas Gibson Considers Legal Action After ‘Criminal Minds’ Dismissal
Gibson’s firing was prompted by an alleged incident in which he kicked the writer of an episode he, Gibson, was directing. It’s been reported that this was a third-strike-and-you’re-out situation. In 2013, Gibson was arrested on suspicion of DUI, and in 2010, he allegedly shoved an assistant director; Gibson took eight hours of anger management classes. But clearly, firing him was something the show didn’t want to do: Initially, it was announced that the actor was merely suspended for one, perhaps two, episodes.
The quick follow-up of a firing suggests there was something more basic to the ongoing health and success of the show in the final decision. CM makes a lot of money for its production companies, ABC Studios and CBS Television Studios. It does so by giving its loyal audience a steady diet of grisly murders solved by a hardy band of FBI agents that mixes hard-headed realists like Gibson’s Hotch and Joe Mantegna’s Rossi with colorful eccentrics like Kirsten Vangsness’s Penelope Garcia and Matthew Gray Gubler’s Spencer Reid.
Is it possible that the unrelenting grimness of Criminal Minds itself preyed upon Gibson after all those seasons of bloodthirsty “unsubs” and terrorized victims, contributing to his black moods? It seems like a stretch, but recall that the show’s first star, Mandy Patinkin, spent two seasons on Minds before ankling the show in 2007 to — if you believe him — save his soul. “The biggest public mistake I ever made was that I chose to do Criminal Minds in the first place,” he told New York Magazine at the time. “I never thought they were going to kill and rape all these women every night, every day, week after week, year after year. It was very destructive to my soul and my personality.”
By contrast and in fairness, one cannot say that CM fosters a poor working environment based solely on who leaves or stays. Paget Brewster is returning to the show this season as her character Emily Prentiss, and has tweeted frequently about the camaraderie of those she works with on the set.
Criminal Minds will go into Season 12 at full steam, with Hotch appearing initially in episodes already shot, and then phased out. He’s been a grounding presence on the show for every one of those seasons, and it seems reasonable to wonder: Will the disappearance of Hotch botch the dramatic balance of the show? Yes, Rossi is also a mature, calming presence in the midst of CM’s mayhem, but he’s never been the most prominent, firm, and moral compass that Hotch was. I’m wondering whether fans will feel that there’s now something damaged about Criminal Minds, or at the least, off-balance and fundamentally unsound about a Hotchless show. How much will the show suffer, and when does everyone involved decide, well, we’ve made as much money off of this thing as we can, let’s pull the plug?
Or to quote another aper?u — this one by Thomas Hardy — that Hotch rumbled at the start of a Season 6 episode, “To every bad there’s a worse.”
Criminal Minds Season 12 premieres Wednesday, Sept. 28.