David Boreanaz's 114-Episode Action Thriller Series Officially Refuses To Die On Streaming
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Tom is based in the UK and when he's not writing about TV shows, he's watching them. He's also an avid horror fiction writer, gamer, and has a Dungeons and Dragons habit that he tries (and fails) to keep in check.
It’s always interesting when a TV show’s popularity explodes after finding its way to Netflix. From Gilmore Girls to Suits, plenty of series enjoyed admirable broadcast runs before becoming something much bigger once they hit the Netflix library. The streamer’s enormous subscriber base can put an established show in front of an entirely new audience overnight, occasionally making a series that ended years earlier feel like one of TV’s hottest properties again.
It has been a while since 2023’s Suits-mania, but 2026 has produced another striking example. All seven seasons of CBS and Paramount+’s SEAL Team arrived on Netflix this year, two years after the military drama ended in 2024. Subscribers immediately pounced on its enormous 114-episode backlog, turning a completed series that had seemingly run its course into an unexpected Netflix hit.
A relatively simple military procedural drama on the surface, SEAL Team follows Jason Hayes (David Boreanaz) and Bravo Team, an elite Navy SEAL unit whose dangerous deployments often come at personal cost. That straightforward formula sustained the show for seven seasons after its 2017, but the move to Netflix in August revealed there was apparently plenty of demand left. The show reached Netflix’s global English-language TV Top 10 with 2.3 million views and 36.4 million viewing hours during the week it arrived (via MovieWeb), proving that while SEAL Team may have ended, audiences clearly haven’t finished with it.
Streaming Has Brought SEAL Team Back From The Dead
SEAL Team was never an unsuccessful series. It lasted four seasons on CBS before moving to Paramount+ and ultimately reached seven seasons. However, it was never the kind of ratings phenomenon that completely dominated pop-culture TV conversations either. Even on Paramount+, where its loyal fandom followed it when it moved for season 6 in 2022, the series was better characterized as a reliable performer than a flagship-level phenomenon.
Still, SEAL Team consistently ranked among Paramount+’s 10 most-watched original series. Its eventual ending was not simply the result of viewers abandoning it, either. Both the showrunners and David Boreanaz had decided he was ready to leave Jason and SEAL Team behind. The ending wasn’t the result of a studio executive deciding the show was no longer a viable financial investment. It was simply that both the creative team and its stars felt the story had run its course.
Still, Netflix has given SEAL Team another level of exposure. The show didn’t just do well, it became one of the platform’s most watched series when it debuted, and it still ranks in the Top 10 in multiple international territories at time of writing (via FlixPatrol). Even at its peak on Paramount+ during the season seven premier, SEAL Team only reached 5.15 million viewing hours (reported as 309 million minutes viewed via TVLine). This was huge news for Paramount+ at the time, but it’s still a much smaller figure than the 36.4 million viewing hours the show amassed on Netflix when it debuted.
Simply putting SEAL Team on a larger streaming platform gave an already dependable series an impressive second life. It remains a Paramount+ hit too, including still appearing in the streamer's worldwide Top 10 in September 2026 (via FlixPatrol), but Netflix has clearly increased its viewership to levels it’s never before experienced.
SEAL Team Could Have Gone On Forever
That resurgence makes SEAL Team’s ending with only seven seasons even more surprising, which it already was when considering that its premise was built for longevity. Bravo Team could be sent virtually anywhere and given almost any mission, providing the writers with an endless supply of new episodic operation-of-the-week storylines. New geopolitical threats, changing assignments and personnel turnover could theoretically have kept SEAL Team going for many more years.
SEAL Team certainly became increasingly serialized as it progressed, with plotlines like Jason’s struggles with traumatic brain injury being the focus of season-wide arcs. However, the show never completely abandoned its procedural foundations. Episodic standalone missions remained its driving force, meaning viewers could keep returning for a new operation while longer stories developed around them.
It's the kind of format that lends itself to 10 seasons or more. Solid TV military dramas are hardly dependent on one central mystery that eventually needs solving. There’s basically no risk of a series outstaying its welcome if the fanbase is there to keep watching. What’s more, the appetite for slick, high-stakes action clearly did not disappear when SEAL Team stopped making new episodes.
Its Netflix numbers prove there’s an eager audience hungry for more SEAL Team or, indeed, a replacement show just like it. Most importantly, the show has only been gone since 2024. Its ending is still recent, and its streaming audience is demonstrably active. Only two years on from its finale, it's far from too late for SEAL Team to find some way back into action.
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