Write about CBS’ Criminal Minds (airing Wednesdays at 9/8c) — any story about it, really — and a small sect of fans is sure to surface throwing their weight behind a someday romance between BAU agents Hotch (played by Thomas Gibson) and Prentiss (Paget Brewster).
Yet at least two factors might keep the Criminal Minds coworkers from ever broaching a workplace romance. For one, Hotch’s ex-wife was killed by a serial killer not two calendar years ago. There’s also the matter of while it’s one thing to have a lunch date with Lenny, the guy who drives the delivery van at your flower shop, it’s another to mix pleasure with a business that is so not conducive to canoodling.
“I’ve read [about some fans' want for a romance] and I don’t know how to respond to it,” Paget Brewster recently shared with TVLine. “I understand it on the one hand, because in the real FBI, people work so closely and are only around each other, so chances are that sooner or later they date each other. In some ways, it’s human nature.”
But on the other hand — and this is a valid point — “The idea that Hotch and I might be fooling around in a roundtable room when children are dying somewhere is really not appealing,” Brewster notes. “It’s a really hard line to ride, so I don’t know if they’ll ever write that. I really don’t.”
Thomas Gibson was similarly bearish on the idea when we ran it by him moments later, responding, “No, no, no…. Not unless it was one of those drunken evenings between Hotch and Prentiss.” (Yeah, one of those evenings. As if!)
Besides, Hotch is not the sort “to get involved with anybody he works with,” he contends. “Come on, he can’t do that!”
“That being said…,” Gibson added, “we’ll see.”
SourceWell, now I'm picturing Hotch/Prentiss drunkenly going at it on the conference room table.