SEAL Team ended in early fall 2024 after seven seasons, 114 episodes, a network TV cancellation, and a move to a streaming service that proved to be the ideal platform. David Boreanaz plays Jason Hayes, the lead of Bravo Team, but Jason has more to contend with than his action-packed adventures.
Now, with the final season and the entire series soon to be available in a way that goes beyond a Paramount+ subscription, Boreanaz opened up to CinemaBlend about why he initially turned down SEAL Team and why he’s so proud now.
With both the final season of SEAL Team and the entire series available on DVD starting December 17, there’s no better time to look back at where the hit show began and what could have been very different. When I spoke to Boreanaz about the entire show being released on physical media as well as streaming, I noted that it always felt quite cinematic to me for a television production. Boreanaz responded:
That pilot was filmed in New Orleans, and I was originally offered the role by the network, and I turned it down. I didn’t want to move to New Orleans, and there was no ice rink for my kids to go skating. I had just finished a series and I was like, ‘I’m not moving to New Orleans.’ Luckily, it came back, which I had never heard of. It was just fate that I would come in, and [I] parachuted into a show that was three days into production, had a ton of money in it, and was bleeding. And I came in and saved the show. It was definitely going to be DOA. That’s how I see it.
Back in the SEAL Team CBS days, the network apparently had David Boreanaz eyeing Jason Hayes before the actor was ready to sign on for another lead role.
He had just finished twelve seasons as the lead of Bones on Fox, after five seasons of Angel and a recurring role on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Luckily, the opportunity came up a second time, Boreanaz signed on to play Jason Hayes, and the rest is history. Boreanaz continues:
On the film side, when I came in, it was like, ‘This is how we shoot it.’ When you have a director of photography named Jimmy Muro, who did Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, Heat, Horizon, they want to think about scope and production value.
And we achieved that. Plus, we were very live with it. We had no rehearsals, really no rehearsals. We just took the camera, stuck it in the guy’s face and went for it. So the energy was real. It was live.
The energy was so “real” and “live” that David Boreanaz decided even before the show was canceled that he was “done with the show,” and it’s interesting to see what SEAL Team might have been up to with what was written before the news broke that Season 7 would be the last. He continued, explaining what the experience of being on the show can be like for newcomers and what he’s proud of now:
I always say [to] people who come on, it’s really easy to get exposed if you’re not prepared for the role that you’re playing on the show. But what’s great about it is the way the cast will rally around that person and lift them up and really support that and say, ‘Hey, we can do this.’ That’s really a huge accomplishment, a proud moment that we all have, for the cast.
The cast coming together to lift up newcomers is just one element of SEAL Team that David Boreanaz was proud of during our conversation, as he shared that he’s “very proud that we were able to sustain and that the fans continued to follow us to another platform” after CBS canceled. He also shared what it meant to play Jason Hayes for the better part of a decade despite the loss:
Being able to play a character like this for so many years was hard on my body, physically and mentally, and I’m so glad to be done with this series. When we were shooting in Colombia on that last day, it was the biggest weight off my shoulders, on so many levels. The fans were amazing.
They seemed to love it. For the veterans… the biggest thing for me is, ‘Hey, this is a love letter to those who served, who served and sacrificed.’ The biggest reward I can get from a show like this is really when they say, ‘Thank you,’ or say, ‘You saved my life. You allowed me to find the strength to get help for my TBI or PTSD, whatever it is. So I’m very proud of that.
SEAL Team may have been cinematic and action-packed from the very first episode, but much of the story is dedicated to the members of Bravo dealing with that intensity while they’re at home and trying to carry on with their normal lives. Sometimes, that home special features that you won’t find streaming, you can find them on DVD from retailers now. The SEAL Team: The Final Season set spans three discs and offers more than 35 minutes of special features, including deleted scenes, featurettes, and the always-popular blooper reel.
