SEAL Team was one of many shows that ended for was canceled in 2024, with the military drama officially debuting its series finale earlier this month. It was announced late last year that SEAL would be ending after Season 7, and the show mostly managed to give closure to Bravo amid the 2024 TV schedule. Now, EP Spencer Hudnut is revealing just how far Season 7 was written ahead of the cancellation news coming down.
While series star David Boreanaz was ready for SEAL Team to end, that doesn’t mean the decision was made right away. The series was renewed for a seventh season in January 2023, with news of its demise coming that November. That’s an awfully long time between the renewal and cancellation and unfortunately, enough time to get pretty far into the script without knowing the end was coming. That's what happened, as Spencer Hudnut told TVLine that Season 7 was nearly completed by the time Paramount+ decided to axe the show:
When we broke this season, at the point it was 90% written, I did not have an inkling that this would be the last one. It really wasn’t until very late in the process that I realized this was going to be it, and I really only had three acts of the final episode to ‘land the plane.'
It’s certainly not ideal for a development like that to come in the midst of writing a series finale. Chances are that if the producer had known from the jump that the show would be ending, much of the season -- including the finale -- would've been different. At the very least, Spencer Hudnut did find out before writing was done, which wasn't as bad as finding out after the script was completed. After all, the series finale of SEAL still wrapped up stories and provided characters with closure, even splitting up some of Bravo. Even if it wasn’t the ending that Hudnut might have had in mind, I still dug it.
What probably helped was the fact that the first part of the season had already set up several characters to move on or put them on paths that would make them take a closer look at what they were doing. However, Spencer Hudnut did admit that David Boreanaz’s Jason received “a different ending than where I intended at the outset of the season.” Regardless of that, the final episodes were still emotional -- and accompanied by sentimental posts from the SEAL Team cast.
Something that was disappointing, though, was that due to his busy schedule on Fire Country, Max Thieriot was unable to appear on SEAL's final season. Granted, his character did die in Season 6, but there was still hope that he could still return as Clay Spenser in a flashback or a dream sequence. At the very least, Clay was mentioned from time to time, and Alona Tal continued to appear as the character's wife, Stella.
I do wonder how SEAL Team's series finale would've played out if the writers had had more notice. Also, I'm thinking about how the plot would've changed if an eighth season had been ordered. Regardless, Spencer Hudnut deserves credit for working with the hand he was dealt. Anyone with a Paramount+ subscription can stream all seven seasons of the military drama now.
