CBS went on a renewal spree before the end of February in the 2025 TV schedule, dropping great news for some of its biggest dramas like Elsbeth and Tracker. Conspicuously missing from the list of shows getting an order for the 2025-2026 TV season was FBI: International, currently in its fourth season with the Fly Team. As a fan of the show who had been hoping for a renewal sooner rather than later, I'm going to focus on a fun story from Eva-Jane Willis that recalls Jesse Lee Soffer's One Chicago days rather than stressing over the wait for renewal news.
I spoke with Eva-Jane Willis, who has been playing Smitty as the Fly Team's Europol liaison since Season 2, about the big Season 4 episode that revisited Smity's past at a school that had kicked her out on trumped up charges years earlier. While the storyline was difficult for Smitty (other than the bright spot of getting to call on former series regular Christiane Paul's Katrin Jaeger for an assist) as a character, the actress only had good things to say about filming the episode, called "Veritas Fidelis" and available streaming now with a Paramount+ subscription.
The show was actually able to film on the campus of the real-life Cambridge University, which doubled as the fictional university that had kicked Smitty out, and she shared that it was "absolutely beautiful" and how one of the "major advantages of being on this show is that we get access to stuff that other people never get access to." Having watched the episode before speaking with her, I had a very specific question about their time filming there.
One of the Fly Team's raids was unexpectedly pretty when it began to snow, despite the rest of the episode being snow-free, so were there extra complications thanks to the weather? Willis responded:
Oh, yes! We weren't expecting it to snow. It was actually raining most of the time we were in Cambridge, but very, very cold and windy. A lot of the scenes we shot there were external scenes, because obviously, if we're in Cambridge, we want people to see what Cambridge looks like, so we weren't inside. First of all, it was just really cold, and then suddenly we were shooting this scene, and the skies opened up, and big, big snowflakes started falling.
The large, fluffy snowflakes that looked lovely to me watching from home weren't quite so lovely from a production standpoint for the actors filming on location in Cambridge. Jesse Lee Soffer, who joined FBI: International in Season 4 after ten seasons of Chicago P.D., took action. Per Eva-Jane Willis:
Jesse actually called our executive producer on video call, and was like, 'Soooo, continuity is going to be an issue. Should we keep going?' And he was like, 'Yeah, just keep going.' And it looked beautiful, so we were like, 'Let's just do it.' That's the thing about England, you never know when it's gonna suddenly snow. The sun might come out, you might get hail, and then you'll have to take your top off because it's too hot. It's like seven seasons in a day. England is renowned for having that kind of crazy surprise weather.
As a viewer of NBC's One Chicago series elsewhere in the nine-show Dick Wolf TV universe that also includes CBS' FBIs, I'd seen plenty of on-location episodes to prove that the Windy City of the U.S. also delivers plenty of crazy weather. When I noted to Eva-Jane Willis that I guessed Soffer might have thought he left the surprise snows behind in Chicago, she laughed and responded:
Yes! He often tells us stories of how cold it gets over there, so when we're all shivering over here, he's like, 'This is nothing. This is fine.' He's always fine.
Even coming from the snow and cold of One Chicago to the world of FBI: International, Soffer doesn't get to film on a beach in Portugal for every episode! It's always fun to hear the actors of such serious shows laughing about behind-the-scenes mishaps, and I can only hope that FBI: International (as well as the currently unrenewed FBI: Most Wanted) gets good news about another season sooner rather than later.
The only one of the three FBI shows that is currently guaranteed a future on CBS is the original series, which was renewed for another three seasons last spring and set to air through the 2026-2027 TV season. I've been a bit nervous about International and Most Wanted since news broke about a potential FBI: CIA spinoff, which would be set in New York City and possibly cheaper to produce than either of the existing spinoffs. And Tuesday night only has so many time slots!
But why worry now when we can focus on much more fun moments out of the FBIs? If you want to rewatch the snowy scene that had Eva-Jane Willis reminiscing, you can do so on Paramount+ by streaming the "Veritas Fidelis" episode of Season 4, and new installments of International air on CBS Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET, between FBI and FBI: Most Wanted.
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