‘SEAL Team’ Season 8? Showrunner Reveals Original Ending If Season 7 Isn’t the End of the Series
SEAL Team came to an end on Sunday (September 5), and now showrunner Spencer Hudnut is speaking out.
In a conversation with TVLine, the showrunner opened up about his original plans for the ending.
SEAL Team follows the professional and personal lives of the Navy SEALs’ most elite unit as they train, plan, and execute the most dangerous, high-risk missions our country could ask of them.
During the discussion, the showrunner talked about when he first thought about ending the series.
“I always try to keep that in mind, probably going back to Season 4, when we moved to Paramount+. There was a minute where I felt like maybe the show was going to end, but I felt like the audience deserved a lot better than that. Every season since then, we’ve tried to end in a place where we would happily leave the characters, where they felt like they had made some progress or felt like they were settling in,” he began.
“I will say that when we ended this season, at the point where it was 90% written, I had no clue that this was going to be the last season. So it was really late in the process that I realized this was going to be the last, and I really only had three acts of the final episode to ‘land the plane.’ Now, they’ve definitely done the third base in their story and their career, so we didn’t have to do too much rearranging. But certainly for Jason, It’s a different ending than I had planned at the beginning of the season.”
When asked about what he had planned for Season 8, he revealed: “That will largely be dictated by the contractual terms that you have when you finish Season 7, the actors have to make decisions…. But when I started this season, the end of the season was Jason and Mandy going to Afghanistan to go on this journey, Jason’s path to redemption, which we then had to cram into the episode in a different way.”
“My hope is to put them on a path where Jason is on the path to forgive himself and clear the stain of war off of him, but also land in a place where we can get them in trouble to start a potential Season 8 in a really big way,” he teased.
On the unresolved issue, he said: “We’ve really been building Drew and Omar up over the course of the season to the point where next season Omar is taking steps to start to reconcile with his son. And there’s a lot more to Drew and his backstory, where with the help of Jason and his teammates, he’s going to start to make amends with his family. So I’m excited to see where we can take those two characters. We’ve got 114 episodes to tell a lot of great stories, and I’m so proud of the show, but it’s a little bit melancholy until Sunday, that’s all.”
