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 a festive mood. Except for the producers of the military drama SEAL Team, who were not in a festive mood.
The reason was CBS executives’ efforts to replace the female lead opposite David Boreanaz in the pilot, Jessica Paré. There had been a red flag about the lightning-quick turnaround at the network’s welcome presentation at Carnegie Hall earlier that afternoon when the main cast of SEAL Team took the stage without Paré. This absence was telling, 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 SEAL Team’s 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 up against huge odds for what Moonves said had taken place, the SEAL Team creative and production team, including Boreanaz, who has been an executive producer since the beginning, made a passionate plea and kept going until Paré was safe. She remained a main cast member for three seasons of the series, about an elite unit of the US Navy SEALs, until her character unexpectedly left the unit after returning from her latest mission in Afghanistan in the season 4 premiere, which aired at the height of the pandemic in December 2020. Paré has since returned and has been a regular on the show, which will conclude its run on Paramount+ this weekend after seven seasons on CBS and the streaming service—a rare series to have run 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 its crime spinoffs NCIS: Hawai’i, CSI: Vegas, and FBI: International, as well as the medical drama Good Sam. Ironically, SEAL Team has outlived 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, along with other new shows.
While NCIS: Hawai’i and CSI: Vegas had no choice, SEAL Team moved to Paramount+ after four seasons on CBS. Unsurprisingly, few broadcast series have been able to do so 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—and the cast and showrunner Spencer Hudnut are ready for more, with Season 7 not envisioned as the final chapter until it was announced last November that it would be the end. 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. Bolstered by a loyal fan base and widespread support from veterans, SEAL Team ran for seven seasons, a respectable lifespan in this day and age, despite its high cost and limited international sales potential due to its focus on the U.S. military versus the more easily translatable crime, medical, and legal procedural genres.
It was a rare series that performed well on both the linear and digital fronts—it was the highest-rated CBS series when it ended its run in May 2021, averaging 6.5 million viewers that season. Just a few months later, It made Paramount+’s year-end list as the platform’s most-watched original series of 2021. Fittingly, SEAL Team hit another milestone before its end, finally breaking into Nielsen’s Top 10 streaming originals in August with the two-episode Season 7 premiere.
