SEAL Team is one of many shows that have been canceled in 2024, with the military drama officially premiering its final episode earlier this month. It was announced late last year that SEAL would be ending after Season 7, and the show essentially closed out Bravo’s 2024 TV schedule. Now, EP Spencer Hudnut is revealing how far into the writing Season 7 was before the cancellation news broke.
While series star David Boreanaz was ready for SEAL Team to end, that doesn’t mean the decision was made right away. The series was renewed for a seventh season in January 2023, with news of its demise coming in November of that year. That’s a lot of time between renewal and cancellation, and unfortunately, enough time to get pretty far into the script without knowing the end was coming. That’s what happened, as Spencer Hudnut told TVLine that Season 7 was nearly complete by the time Paramount+ decided to axe the show: When we broke the season, at the point where it was 90 percent written, I had no clue that this was going to be the last. It wasn’t until really late in the process that I realized this was going to be the last, and I really only had three acts of the finale to ‘land the plane.’
It’s certainly not ideal for such a development to come in the middle of writing a series finale. It’s very possible that if the producers had known from the start that the show was going to end, much of the season — including the finale — would have been different. At the very least, Spencer Hudnut found out before writing was complete, which isn’t as bad as finding out after the script was finished. After all, the SEAL series finale still wrapped up the story and provided closure for the characters, even splitting up some Bravo. Even if it wasn’t the ending Hudnut had in mind, I still liked it.
It probably helped that the beginning of the season set up several characters to move on or sent them down paths that made them take a closer look at what they were doing. However, Spencer Hudnut has admitted that David Boreanaz’s Jason got “a different ending than I had planned at the beginning of the season.” Regardless, the final episodes were still emotional — and were accompanied by emotional posts from the SEAL Team cast.
One disappointment, however, was that due to his busy schedule on Fire Country, Max Thieriot wasn’t able to appear in SEAL’s final season. Indeed, his character died in Season 6, but there’s still hope that he could return as Clay Spenser in a flashback or dream sequence. At least Clay has been mentioned from time to time, and Alona Tal continues to appear as the character’s wife, Stella.
I wonder how the SEAL Team series ending would have panned out if the writers had been given more notice. Also, I wonder how the plot would have changed if an eighth season had been ordered. Regardless, Spencer Hudnut deserves credit for the hand he’s been dealt. Anyone with a Paramount+ subscription can stream all seven seasons of the military drama right now.
