It's now June, meaning we are nearly halfway through 2025.
How did that happen? It seemed like it was just February, I blinked, and here we are.
With the beginning of summer, the winter/spring television season is officially at an end.
I don't have a lot of time to watch television, but there are a few shows I enjoy; unfortunately, several of them won't be coming back when the new seasons start up this fall.
One of my favourites was SWAT. Based on the old 1970s television series and starring Shemar Moore, the series followed 20-Squad of the Los Angeles Police Department's acclaimed SWAT teams.
Despite staring down cancellation on two previous occasions, strike three was the magic number which saw SWAT roll out for good. As a series finale, the mid-May ender worked. The episode saw the city under attack, with the team racing to save it.
While I would have liked to have seen some of the past characters return for the finale, or some of the occasional guest stars, the writers did a solid job of tying up the loose ends yet leaving things open-ended enough that, should a revival occur, there is room for it to happen.
Speaking of revivals, SWAT did not stay dead very long, with a new series titled SWAT: Exiles having been ordered by Sony, one of the producers of the original. All that is known about the series so far is that Moore is set to reprise his role, it's set to film this summer, and it doesn't yet have a distributor.
Another series I enjoy watching, when I get the time, is the FBI trio by Dick Wolf. Unfortunately, that trio has been cut down to a duo with FBI:Most Wanted ending after six seasons and FBI: International ending after four. The second show, making the duo for the fall television season, is a spinoff called CIA, starring Tom Ellis, which has been ordered straight to series, but not much else is known about it at this time.
The flagship series, FBI, which follows agents of the New York field office of the FBI, offered a typical case-of-the-week fare for the season finale. While there were explosions and conspiracies, they were nothing too far off real life in today's Trump-led America.
FBI: Most Wanted and FBI: International couldn't have been more different in their endings.
In the FBI: Most Wanted finale was inspired by the real-life American Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In the episode, workers at a DOGE-like entity were on a killing spree as they used their federal access powers to try and steal data. It was up to the Fugitive Task Force, led by Remy Scott, played by Dylan McDermott, to catch them.
The story concluded with the team at Scott's new restaurant, him announcing his retirement, and some of the threads of the other characters tied up in a bow. The team was not disbanded, and the way things were left, it's definitely possible we'll see the characters again on other Dick Wolf shows.
Most Wanted and International had the announcement that they had been cancelled back in February. With the ending of Most Wanted, it's obvious to me that the series was still filming, and the writers took care to end the series on a high note.
International, on the other hand, was the polar opposite. International followed the FBI fly team based in Hungary as they solved crimes involving Americans around Europe. The series is led by Jesse Lee Soffer, who plays team leader Wes Mitchell.
International was cancelled at the same time as Most Wanted was, and I can not believe how totally different the two endings were. Where Most Wanted tied everything up in a bow, leaving very few plot threads hanging, International tied up very few.
In fact, in the two-part series finale, only one of the many characters was given a proper send-off in the first half, and the second half was the Wes Mitchell show, with the rest of the fly team and support staff being relegated to the sidelines in Budapest while he ran around Tokyo on the hunt for a serial killer.
Given that both the series knew they were ending, it's remarkable how differently they ended. In short, Most Wanted went out with a bang and International went out with –barely– a whimper.
A final show I want to touch on is the Justin Hartley-led Tracker.
That show swept in like a storm after the 2024 Super Bowl, and quickly became the most watched show of the 2023-24 television season. The show follows Hartley's Colter Shaw as he seeks rewards looking for missing people around the United States.
In my opinion, the writing slipped a bit in the second season, but the show still remains one of our favourites. While the season finale did deal with a case of the week, as usual, it also tied in the overarching mystery that has surrounded Shaw since the inception of the show.
With so many of our favourites off the schedule, this fall will be interesting. Maybe it’s time to discover a new gem—or revisit a few classics –I'm looking at you SEAL Team.
-Kevin Sabo is the editor of the Stettler Independent and a journalist for Black Press Media.
