After watching Friends, The Office, Parks and Recreation, Mad Men, CSI and other very popular off-net shows leave its platform over the last few years, Netflix is about to watch another acquired stalwart walk out the door, Criminal Minds.
The CBS procedural drama ranks as one of the most popular acquired series on Netflix. According to Nielsen, which measures subscription streaming usage for platforms including Netflix via sampling on TVs only, Criminal Minds was the second most watched acquired show among U.S. viewers for the week of May 9-15, garnering 546 million minutes of streaming.
But on June 29, all 12 seasons and 321 episodes of Criminal Minds currently available on Netflix will shift over to Paramount Plus, which will now host all 15 seasons of the ABC Studios-produced series, along with an upcoming revival of show. (The final three seasons of Criminal Minds, which unfurled between 2018-2020 and were never available on Netflix, will still stream on Hulu.)
Also read - Nielsen: Netflix Streaming of ‘Criminal Minds’ Stays Hot. But Does ViacomCBS Want It Back?
Criminal Minds was produced by Disney/ABC's Touchstone TV unit for CBS from 2005-2020, dramatizing the work of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis unit and featuring actors including Shemar Moore, Matthew Gray Gubler, Paget Brewster, A.J. Cook, Kirsten Vangsness, Joe Mantegna, and Mandy Patinkin.
Episodes started streaming on Netflix starting in 2014.
With the loss, Netflix will still have long-running broadcast dramas NCIS and Grey's Anatomy -- which also consistently rank among its top 10 off-net shows -- on its thumbnail grid.
But the ranks of acquired shows from major studios, once easily provided by media companies that viewed Netflix as a competitive threat akin to the "Albanian Army," continues to whittle away.
