Franchises have produced some of the biggest and longest-running hits on network television, and CBS is the home of several. The NCIS TV universe, which technically started with a backdoor pilot on JAG in 2003, has been running for more than two decades, while the Fire Country world expanded to include Sheriff Country. The FBI franchise seemed like one of the network's most solid, with the original series doing well and spinoffs FBI: Most Wanted and FBI: International mostly keeping up. CBS cancelling the spinoffs in 2025 ultimately backfired, and no fewer than four ongoing shows have suffered.
CBS had a good thing going in the 2024-2025 TV schedule, with Tuesday nights made up of Dick Wolf's FBI, FBI: International, and FBI: Most Wanted. While the two spinoffs didn't perform quite as well as the parent series, starring Missy Peregrym and Zeeko Zaki, the network's FBI Tuesdays had been a staple of the primetime lineup going back to 2020.
Meanwhile, Monday nights belonged to another franchise, with NCIS and NCIS: Origins all airing back-to-back. NCIS: Sydney had a spot on Friday nights. Like FBI, the NCIS spinoffs weren't earning as large of audiences as the original show, but everything seemed to be doing well.
Apparently, everything was not doing so well that CBS wanted to keep the lineup going into the 2025-2026 season. Not only were FBI: Most Wanted and FBI: International cancelled after six and four seasons (respectively), but the network switched FBI to Mondays and all three NCIS shows to Tuesdays. The premiere of CIA, starring Nick Gehlfuss and Tom Ellis, did expand the FBI universe again, but not soon enough to fix the overall viewership ahead of FBI season 9.
Cancelling Both FBI: Most Wanted And FBI: International Was A Mistake
CBS' biggest winners in audience size from the 2024-2025 TV season were Tracker, Matlock, Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage, and Ghosts, according to Variety, but all three FBI shows were still in the network's Top 15 most-watched shows on average. NCIS and NCIS: Origins were in the Top 15 as well, although NCIS: Sydney came in at No. 17.
None of them were earning Tracker-level numbers, but FBI Tuesdays and NCIS Mondays seemed solid. The audience numbers for the 2025-2026 TV season (via Variety) were very different, and the biggest variable was certainly the cancellations of FBI: Most Wanted and FBI: International.
Show | 2024-2025 Season | 2025-2026 Season | Difference With New Time Slot |
|---|---|---|---|
FBI | 10.6 million | 8.9 million | -1.7 million |
NCIS | 10.6 million | 10 million | -0.6 million |
NCIS: Origins | 9.3 million | 7.6 million | -1.7 million |
NCIS: Sydney | 7.1 million | 5.5 million | -1.6 million |
FBI: Most Wanted | 8.4 million | Cancelled | ___ |
FBI: International | 8.2 million | Cancelled | ___ |
CIA | ___ | 8.9 million | ___ |
On top of losing the spinoffs that created a full night of FBI action, the move from Tuesdays at 8 p.m. to Mondays at 9 p.m. caused FBI to lose nearly two million viewers. In fact, CBS' Mondays were so disappointing in the first half of the 2025-2026 season that the other three shows (The Neighborhood, DMV, and Watson) have all been cancelled, and CBS' fall 2026 schedule has retooled Monday nights.
NCIS switching slots with FBI didn't pay off for that series either. The show had been doing well on Mondays at 9 p.m. for four full seasons before being swapped over to Tuesdays last fall, leading to a drop of more than half a million viewers. NCIS: Origins' move to Tuesdays came with an even larger drop of nearly two million. In a surprise twist, NCIS: Sydney actually did better on Fridays than when it was grouped with the rest of the franchise on Tuesday nights.
Both NCIS: Sydney and Origins' totals for the 2025-2026 season were lower than FBI: International and FBI: Most Wanted's were in those Tuesday night time slots the year before. The numbers paint a clear picture: CBS was earning more viewers with NCIS Mondays and FBI Tuesdays than it was after the cancellations of International and Most Wanted. CIA's much-hyped arrival on Mondays to join FBI may have been a factor in FBI reaching nearly nine million.
Ultimately, the cancellations of FBI: Most Wanted and FBI: International cost CBS two of its Top 15 most-watched shows, and the subsequent schedule changes resulted in smaller audiences for FBI as well as the full NCIS lineup.
Could CBS Bring The Spinoffs Back?
CBS did not just cancel the two FBI spinoffs due to the sizes of their audiences. In fact, FBI: International and FBI: Most Wanted had larger audiences in their final seasons than several of the renewed shows did. Amy Reisenbach, President of CBS Entertainment, explained the decision (via TVLine):
Obviously we love working with Dick [Wolf] and we're so excited to be bringing [the new FBI franchise expansion] CIA onto the schedule. But going back to what we just said [about The Equalizer's cancellation], we have to be fiscally responsible, and ultimately those deals and the shows just weren't penciling out for us for an economic perspective.
The reason for the cancellations came down to money, but Reisenbach didn't go into detail about what made Most Wanted and International too pricy to continue. It's never been clear how filming in Budapest and across Europe affected International's costs, compared to both FBI and Most Wanted filming in New York. Both shows had large ensemble casts as well.
Starting the shows back up again and reassembling the casts seems much more expensive than it would have been to just keep them going in the first place, and CBS has filled the fall schedule with new shows. It's unlikely that FBI: Most Wanted or FBI: International will ever return as solo series.
That said, FBI could very well bring back characters from the cancelled show. Nina, played by Shantel VanSanten on Most Wanted, appeared in the original series' eighth season. Considering the disappointing way that International ended, FBI taking an episode or two to provide closure for the Fly Team might be the best that fans could hope for. CIA is another possibility, since crossovers with FBI firmly established that they share a TV universe.
CIA Season 2's Fate Officially Decided By CBS After Rocky Season 1 Production
The fate of CBS' new FBI spinoff series, CIA, has now been decided.
CBS confirmed that CIA has officially been renewed for season 2, following impressive viewership numbers from its series premiere. According to Paramount, the premiere episode saw 8.4 million multiplatform viewers via broadcast and streaming within the first seven days of its release.
Ratings for the first three episodes of the series showed a 39% improvement on Monday at 10 p.m. compared to the same timeslot in fall 2025.
Behind the scenes, though, CIA has had a rocky production. FBI: Most Wanted showrunner David Hudgins was initially in charge of the series, but Warren Leight later replaced him. That wasn't the end of the turnover, though, as he eventually departed, along with executive producer Eriq La Salle. Mike Weiss, who was the showrunner on the original FBI series, was hired as the CIA showrunner.
All of this turmoil, plus Michael Michele's departure from the cast, caused production delays, and CBS decided to give CIA a mid-season 2026 premiere after previously announcing it would debut in fall 2025.
CIA stars Tom Ellis and Nick Gehlfuss as CIA Agent Colin Glass and FBI Agent Bill Goodman, respectively, who are tasked with working together on a secretive joint CIA/FBI task force. The two agents couldn't be more different, with the latter a rule-follower and the former more mischievous in nature.
While on the job together, Glass and Goodman stay in the shadows as they solve domestic and international crimes away from the eyes of the public.
Before CIA, Ellis was best known for his role as Lucifer Morningstar on the Fox/Netflix drama Lucifer, while Gehlfuss has starred in The Newsroom, Shameless, and Chicago Med (another Dick Wolf-created series).
Their CIA co-stars include Necar Zadegan and Natalee Linez. Zadegan, who plays Nikki Reynard, will guest star in the March 30 episode of FBI season 8, in which the Deputy Chief of Station is called in to help following a double homicide. The episode will mark Maggie Bell's return to the team after suffering a major loss.
Wolf created the hugely popular Law & Order and One Chicago franchises on NBC, and then went on to create the FBI crime procedural franchise for CBS. The first FBI series debuted in 2018 with star Missy Peregrym and is currently airing its eighth season.
Two years later, the first spinoff, FBI: Most Wanted, launched and aired for six seasons. FBI: International followed in its footsteps and aired for four seasons.
CIA, which currently has a 63% critic score and 51% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, marks the third FBI spinoff, with Wolf, Weiss, Ken Girotti, Paul Cabbad, Nicole Perlman, David Chasteen, Anastasia Puglisi, and Peter Jankowski serving as executive producers.
CIA airs Mondays at 10 p.m. EDT on CBS.
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