SEAL Team came to an end on Sunday (September 5), and now showrunner Spencer Hudnut is speaking out.
During a conversation with TVLine, the show’s boss spoke about his original finale plans.
SEAL Team follows the professional and personal lives of the most elite unit of Navy SEALs as they train, plan and execute the most dangerous, high-stakes missions our country can ask of them.
During the discussion, the showrunner spoke about when he first thought of a series finale.
“I’ve always kind of tried to have it in the back of my mind, going back probably to Season 4, when we made that move to Paramount+. There was a minute where it felt like maybe the show was ending, yet I felt like the audience deserves so much better than that. Every season since then, we’ve tried to end it in a place where we’d be happy to leave the characters, where they feel like they’ve made some progress or feel settled,” he began.
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“I will say that 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. So, 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.’ Now, they were definitely rounding third base in their stories and their careers, so we didn’t have to do too much rejiggering. But certainly for Jason, it was a different ending than what I intended at the outset of the season.”
When asked about what he intended for Season 8, he revealed: “That was going to be largely dictated by the contractual things you run into when you get to an end of a Season 7, the actors who have to come to a decision…. But when I originally broke this season, the end of the season was Jason and Mandy arriving in Afghanistan to go on this journey, this road to atonement for Jason, which we had to then kind of cram into the episode in a different way.”
“My hope was to set them off on a path where Jason was on the road to figuring out a way to forgive himself, and wipe the stains of war off of him, but also land in a place where we could get them into trouble to start a potential Season 8 in a really big way,” he teased.
As far as unresolved business, he said: “We were really building up Drew and Omar over the season to the point where next season Omar was going to take steps to start reconciling with his son. And there was a whole bunch of other stuff with Drew and his backstory, where with Jason and his teammates’ help, he was going to start making amends with his own family. So, those two characters, I was excited to see where we could take them. We had 114 episodes to get to tell a lot of great stories, and I’m very proud of the show, but yeah, there’s a little bit of melancholy that as of Sunday, that’s it.”
