The first episode of "Evolution" is called "Just Getting Started," yet it's technically the series' 325th episode. What is your personal hope for this revival?
My only personal hope is that all our existing fans out there are able to say, "We're so glad it's back. This is just what we'd hoped for, and we enjoy it," and that any new people who check it out are able to say, "Now I understand why this thing was so popular and why they're bringing it back."
People always ask me, "What do you want the audience to walk away with?" My one answer would be that they can say, "That was time well spent." That's all. That's all you could ever hope for.
There's no message involved as far as I'm concerned, [no] "I want them to know this" or "I want them to feel that." That's a personal thing. What they take away from it is up to them. But if they can say, "That was time well spent. I enjoyed that time I invested to watch this, and I would like to watch more of it," that's all you can hope for.
People seem very excited to see the revival, so hopefully the Paramount+ series will be popular.
I should hope. We love our fans. In fact, this is an interesting anecdote. We all get a lot of fan mail. We get fan mail from all over the world — China, Japan, Europe, Australia, you name it. Often, they'll send a little photo that they have and a self-addressed, stamped envelope and say, "Would you please personalize this to me? I'm such a huge fan." Recently, I got something that was returned. It came back undeliverable, and I realized it was one of the foreign letters I had received, and when I looked closely, it was a fan letter from Ukraine. I had addressed it to this girl named Denise because she had written a letter that was like, "Dear Joe, I'm a big fan, and we live here in Ukraine."
I looked up the address I had sent it to, and it was now in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine. All of a sudden, here I am looking at this little fan letter, thinking, "Wow. This has some contemporary historical significance for me." Here's this young girl who obviously loves our show living in this small town in Ukraine and wanted an autograph[ed] picture, and I was happy to send it to her, and now it's returned. I felt really bad.
I saved the letter, and I'm hoping that one day I'm able to get it back to her. I'm going to keep writing back to see if something gets delivered and make sure she gets that photo back. But that's a moment where reality hits you in the face after all of the pretending that we do for a living. It's very personal, and one of the reasons I'm so grateful for the success of our show [is] we even have fans living in a war-torn country, and hopefully everybody will sort out what's going on over there.
"Criminal Minds: Evolution" will premiere with back-to-back episodes on Thursday, November 24 on Paramount+.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
