Alert: Missing Persons Unit brought a new kind of police procedural action to Fox in the 2023 TV premiere schedule, but the show has already wrapped its first season. The finale was a two-hour TV event with some sky-high stakes for Jason Grant (Hawaii Five-0 alum Scott Caan) and Nikki Batista (Dania Ramirez), and one major unanswered question after the finale is whether or not the show will return for Season 2. With no news on whether Alert has a future beyond this finale, let's look at what we know!
What The Showrunner Says
The showrunner of Alert: Missing Persons Unit is none other than John Eisendrath, who accumulated some extensive crime drama experience over on NBC as an executive producer of The Blacklist before co-creating Alert for Fox. The co-creator/showrunner spoke with TV Insider about the Season 1 finale, and he had a short and simple statement about the future of the show:
As I tell anyone who asks, I’m the last to know. When everyone else in the world knows, they’ll tell me.
If any decision has been made about whether or not to renew Alert: Missing Persons Unit for Season 2, then John Eisendrath hasn't heard about it! While some shows are lucky enough to have their renewal news ahead of a finale (including NBC's La Brea with its second season finale airing just one day after Alert wrapped for the season), that sadly wasn't the case for this series.
It's not necessarily a bad sign, however, and Fox may simply be waiting to make or announce a final decision. The Season 6 finale of The Resident as the network's medical drama aired back in January, and there's still no word of whether or not a Season 7 will happen. For both The Resident and Alert, let's go with the idea of "no news is good news!"
What The Ratings Say
Now, in an era of streaming services and cord-cutting, ratings aren't quite as meaningful as they once were, but they are a source of data to show how many people are prioritizing a show enough to watch live, and how many care enough to record and watch over the next week. With streaming numbers unavailable (although the show itself is available with a Hulu subscription), it's worth looking at the broadcast ratings in the key 18-49 age demographic.
So let's take a look! The average ratings for Alert: Missing Persons Unit ahead of the finale paint an interesting picture of the audience. According to SpoilerTV, in Live+Same day totals (a.k.a. the number for those who tuned in live), the show averages a rating of 0.4. That jumps up to 0.5 in Live+3 day totals after three days of delayed viewing, and then up to 0.6 in Live+7. When it comes to audience size, Alert averages 2.25 million viewers in Live+Same, which is bumped up to 3.48 million in Live+3 and 4.03 million in Live+7.
While those numbers don't put Alert on the top of Monday nights, they also show a respectable audience that tunes in live, with consistent growth over three days and over seven days. It's not on par with 9-1-1 or 9-1-1: Lone Star as two of Fox's other scripted shows dealing with crime, but it's not terrible.
The Verdict
At this point, we can only speculate about what the future holds for Alert: Missing Persons Unit. Its ratings averages are actually similar to what The Resident averaged for its sixth season, so the shows may share a similar fate, for better or worse. A point possibly in its favor is that Alert also recruited Scott Caan back to television after Hawaii Five-0 wrapped back in 2020, and he certainly had the TV experience to anchor a new cast on a new show.
Airing the last two episodes back-to-back for a two-hour finale could be interpreted as a show of faith from Fox, with the network wanting to give fans an epic event before hiatus... or a sign of the network wanting to burn the rest of the episodes ASAP. It's just hard to say without any statement from the network. At this point, I'm cautiously optimistic but not 100% confident about Alert returning to Fox for Season 2. Hopefully fans just won't have to wait too long to find out its fate!
