The Federal Bureau of Investigation could be back in the spotlight soon with Season 6 of CBS’s FBI.
Coming from the mind of Law & Order creator Dick Wolf, FBI highlights the day-to-day happenings in the Bureau’s New York City field office as the show’s team of agents protects both their state and their country.
After getting a straight-to-series order for 13 episodes in 2017, FBI kickstarted its run on CBS in 2018, and more recently, the network renewed the show for Season 5 and Season 6 simultaneously in May 2022.
FBI Season 6 Gets Update on its Release
Deadline revealed that CBS is hoping to bring series like Season 6 of FBI to the airwaves sometime in mid-February or early March 2024, which is earlier than expected due to the still-ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike.
This is a particularly exciting update considering the show wasn’t expected to return to the air until much later in the season.
To date, FBI has only ever premiered on CBS in the Fall TV season, with four of the first five seasons starting in September and Season 3 starting in November 2020 due to Covid-induced delays.
While Seasons 1-5 consisted of anywhere from 15 to 23 episodes, it’s expected that Season 6 will aim to have a 13-episode slate due to the shorter turnaround between writing and production.
Anticipating that the SAG-AFTRA strike would end within a month of the WGA strike, the show had a writing window of approximately five weeks, which should lead to production being easy to start once the actor’s strike is resolved.
Should that strike end sometime in the next couple of weeks, FBI will still have about three to six weeks of prep, with the hope being that it can start filming by the end of November or early December.
If production were to be held back until January, the show could still produce a 10-episode season that would be able to run until the end of the season in May 2024.
A beginning of January start could also work for some shows to be able to produce 10 episodes that would be able to air before the end of the season in May.
When Will FBI Season 6 Release on CBS?
With each season of FBI being fairly consistent in its release schedule over the years, the biggest question for Season 6 is how many episodes will have the opportunity to be filmed.
Should the series get ordered for either 10 or 13 episodes, its release will simply depend on when the SAG-AFTRA strike ends, especially with writers’ rooms for other shows having started within the last few weeks.
As long as the strike comes to a conclusion sometime before November ends the way some are expecting it to, the aforementioned February/March release timeframe shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for this next season of FBI-centric TV.
Currently, FBI Season 6’s release date remains unconfirmed.