The Unit: What Would Have Happened in the Fifth (and Likely) Final Season

Much to the dismay of The Unit DVD’s loyal followers, The Unit DVD set was cancelled by CBS in May. The series’ viewership had declined in its later years but, despite being preempted several times, still attracted 9.67 million viewers in season four.

The Unit DVD boxset was supposedly being seriously considered to continue in first-run syndication but the deal didn’t work out, likely because of production costs. Sadly, while the military drama and Dennis Haysbert, Regina Taylor, Robert Patrick, and Scott Foley will be around in syndication for years to come, we won’t be seeing season five of The Unit Seasons 1-4 DVD boxset.

It turns out that the writers had a full plan for year five which Executive Producer Shawn Ryan was expecting to be The Unit DVD’s last. He pitched the storyline ideas to the CBS execs but ultimately they weren’t interested.

At the recent TCA press tour, Ryan shared with The Futon Critic what would have happened. He said, “The Unit DVD set was going to be a whole new show in the sense that we were going to be training some young people, Bob was going to be training some people for a whole new organization. Jonas was finally going to be seeing his run end.”

Ryan continued, “The final of The Unit DVD boxset was going to be, I figured the fifth season was going to be the last… It was going to be a long, sort of final mission for Jonas. He’s not medically cleared, Mac has to go in and sort of change the medical records so that Jonas can keep on [going on missions]. We had a whole thing planned, The Unit Seasons 1-4 DVD boxset was going to be good.”

Of the cancellation, Ryan points to CBS’ last-minute decision to save NBC’s discarded Medium series of The Unit DVD. If things had been reversed and The Unit “had been owned by Paramount and Medium had been owned by 20th Century Fox, we’d be making the fifth season of The Unit DVD set right now. I don’t know how else to say that.”

What do you think? Do the plans for The Unit DVD boxset season five sound like a good way for the military drama to finish?