May 17, 2017. The Plaza Hotel’s food court and adjacent floors were packed with attendees for CBS’s annual welcome party—a lavish spectacle in its final year of broadcast dominance. Having won the lottery—beating the daunting odds of pilot season, where hundreds of scripts vie for 20 pilots and, ultimately, a handful of series picked up by a major network—the teams behind new CBS shows were in high spirits. Except for the producers of the military drama SEAL Team, who weren’t in a festive mood.
The reason was CBS executives’ efforts to replace the female lead opposite David Boreanaz’s pilot, Jessica Paré. There had been a red flag about the network’s rush to the Carnegie Hall welcome presentation earlier that afternoon when the cast of SEAL Team took the stage without Paré. This absence speaks volumes because it was a broadcasting rite of passage—if your pilot was picked up, you moved on to the attack—unless you got the call that you were being recast.
There was no official word at the time, but the SEAL Team producers were nervous—it was rumored that then-CBS executive Les Moonves himself suggested replacing Paré. A former actor himself, Moonves was still heavily involved in casting decisions, and he had the final say on everything, deciding the fate of shows and actors. (Moonves resigned in the fall of 2018 following a series of sexual misconduct allegations.) Knowing they were facing high odds for what Moonves said had taken place, the SEAL Team creative and production team, including star/executive producer Boreanaz, made a passionate plea and pressed on until Paré was safe. She remained a main cast member for three seasons of the drama, about an elite unit of U.S. Navy SEALs, until her character abruptly left the unit after returning from her latest mission in Afghanistan in the December 2020 season 4 premiere at the height of the pandemic.
Paré later returned and became a regular on the show, which will end its run on Paramount+ this weekend after seven seasons on CBS and the streaming service—a rare series to have aired three or more seasons on two different platforms.
A few months after Pare left, SEAL Team faced another challenge in May 2021: it was forced to leave CBS to make way for the crime series spinoffs NCIS: Hawai’i, CSI: Vegas, and FBI: International, as well as the medical drama Good Sam. Ironically, SEAL Team has outlasted three of the four series, with NCIS: Hawai’i and CSI: Vegas being canceled earlier this year to make way for another NCIS spinoff, NCIS: Origins, among other new shows.
While NCIS: Hawai’i and CSI: Vegas had no choice, SEAL Team moved to Paramount+ after four seasons on CBS. It’s no surprise that few TV series have been able to pull it off successfully, as it’s not an easy transition, requiring major adjustments to the business framework, including budgets and salaries, as well as production logistics.
But after a four-episode farewell on CBS in the fall of 2021, CBS Studios-produced SEAL Team moved to the streaming service, where it will continue for three more seasons, with the cast and showrunner Spencer Hudnut ready for more, as Season 7 wasn’t envisioned as the final chapter until it was announced last November that it would be.
SEAL Team’s 2021 broadcast farewell wasn’t permanent: Two years later, the series was called back, with episodes from its original run on Paramount+ serving as new airing fare in the fall of 2023 as film and TV productions were delayed by strikes in Hollywood.
