March Makeovers: Should ‘Criminal Minds’ shake things up more beyond Morgan story?

“Criminal Minds” is a show that when it comes to characters is always in at least some sort of flux. Paget Brewster and Jennifer Love Hewitt are a pair of more-notable departures from the series, and we’ve also had some other cast members take some time off here and there for various reasons. Depending on what happens on Wednesday night’s “A Beautiful Disaster,” it also may be fair to question whether or not Morgan makes it through the hour alive.

We know that when it comes to the cast, there is no need to shake things up at all; heck, we know there are plenty of people out there who want to see the same group together forever. What we figure is that there are more questions regarding the show’s format, and whether or not that should be tweaked. At this point eleven seasons in, is the same-old-storytelling working? We want to dive further into that in our newest chapter of our March Makeovers series.

What’s wrong – Basically, we’ve been spoiled by the Dirty Dozen. Until this arc with Morgan came about “Entropy” was the best episode this season, and it’s not even close. As a matter of fact, the two-parters / longer arcs for this show are almost always stronger than the stories-of-the-week, and we think that the biggest reason why is that this show often goes to shock you with how terrible certain UnSubs are. We’ve been conditioned to that, and at this point seeing some sort of horrible culprit doesn’t really do anything to us anymore. The stories of the week tend to all blend together, and the things that stand out are more character-based and give you an opportunity to dive deeper.

How to fix it – What we’d like to see this show do is going for a little bit of a trial run, and do something like what “Major Crimes” did at the end of season 4: Devote a good four or five episodes to a singular arc, and focus almost exclusively on that. Maybe put a few subplots in there, but throw us more into something where we see the highs and lows of our cast members. We’ll appreciate them more, but we’ll also feel more of the terror that comes with seeing an UnSub in action. It can stay the course and be a good show; or, it can try to be great and get people talking once again.

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