No, SEAL Team Won't Fight Pandemic: 'We Want to Give People an Escape'

Matt Webb Mitovich
·3 min read

Bravo Team has many fights in its future, but the coronavirus won’t be one of them.

Though some SEAL Team cast members have been spotted on social media sporting masks while behind the scenes on Season 4, those are purely safety precautions — or, in one case, a snapshot of an episode in which the operators donned “undercover” skull faces — and not as part of any art-imitates-life storyline.

To be clear, some CBS dramas, including NCIS: New Orleans, are writing in the pandemic, as are NBC’s This Is Us and ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy, among many other broadcast shows. But SEAL Team, having not completed production on Season 3’s final two episodes, needs to pick up right where it left off, with Jason, Ray et al on the hunt for HVT Asim al-Hazred.

“We talked about it, and because we have to finish what we started, to all of the sudden be in a pandemic world felt wrong,” showrunner Spencer Hudnut told TVLine as part of our in-depth fall preview. But what’s more, “We also want to give people an escape.”

That said, Hudnut believes that SEAL Team by its very nature speaks to some of the themes — including the fortitude of those on the “front lines” — that have become prevalent ever since the outbreak.

“Thematically, it’s a show about honoring those who raise their hand to run into the fire first, the people who put the greater good above their own,” the EP noted, “so I do think the audience will recognize some themes that we’ve all had to deal with the past couple of months.”

One way in which SEAL Team as a production could be affected by the pandemic is in the area of guest casting, seeing as new safety guidelines aim to minimize the coming and going of actors on set, especially new ones.

“This is definitely something we have talked about and we have to address,” Hudnot acknowledged. “You can’t just have people jump on a plane in New York on Tuesday and show up for work on Wednesday anymore, and that has impacted a bit the stories we’re telling and how we go about telling them.”

SEAL Team will premiere Season 4 sometime in November, airing Wednesdays at 9/8c.

Want scoop on SEAL Team, or for any other show? Email InsideLine@tvline.com and your question may be answered via Matt’s Inside Line.

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