Spin-Off Goals: Should Aisha Tyler of ‘Criminal Minds’ have larger platform for Dr. Tara Lewis?

“Criminal Minds” season 11 is in the middle of what we’d like to call rebound year. They’ve taken some big risks in between the Dirty Dozen story and the implementation of some individual storylines into larger cases. We understand that this is at its core a procedural, but we’re always going to celebrate any opportunity in which the show chooses to play around a little bit with the form.

One other reason we’d argue why this season has been pretty great is the addition of Aisha Tyler as Dr. Tara Lewis. While she hasn’t been in every episode, we’ve seen enough of her to feel like she’s had a major role to play in many cases, and we’ve gotten to see some of who she is and where she comes from. We don’t know what the future holds for her on the flagship show, so with that in mind, we’re crafting this edition of our Spin-Off Goals article series to be about how she could function in her own show, and how it’d stand out versus the original. (Just a quick FYI: This is all just fun chatter. There’s no actual evidence of this happening.)

Why Tara? – Something that we often think about when crafting some of these spin-off articles is finding someone who would be a perfect fit for their own show, is popular, and also has the capacity to leave the other show in which they were on. Given that Tara is still fairly new to the “Criminal Minds” universe, she could transition over and the flagship would be able to move forward without her. They’ve already done it from time to time. She’s also got a particular set of skills (to quote Liam Neeson) that are very useful as a forensic psychologist to almost any team she spends some time with.

The idea – What would it be like to see a show that is more about the courtroom setting than being out in the field? We could see some of Tara’s work interviewing people to determine whether or not they are fit for trial, and also explore many of the issues and struggles that are going on at the moment when it comes to mental health in America. It’s an important topic, and one of the ways you could tie it in further with the flagship series would be to bring over some of the UnSubs from that show to this new one, as you’ll get to see that the arrest is not often the end of the story for many of these people.

Could it actually happen? – It’s a subject up for debate. For now, “Criminal Minds” already has a spin-off coming in “Beyond Borders,” and we’d have to see what that show does in the ratings first before they even consider a spin-off. Another thing to remember here is that as much as we love Tara, Tyler is a very busy woman! We’re amazed that she has been able to appear in as many episodes this season as she has given everything else that she has going on with “The Talk” and other projects.