CBS Officially Cuts Down ‘Fire Country,’ ‘Matlock’ and More



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Fire Country fans have had plenty of content to be “fired up” about since the show first premiered at the end of 2022. Since then, three full seasons of Fire Country have come and gone on CBS, and the fourth is set to wrap up later this month on May 22. Specifics about Season 5 are still being kept under wraps, but it will be a little easier to predict where things are heading once the dust settles after the Season 4 finale. CBS has already officially picked up Fire Country for a fifth season, and better yet, it’s confirmed that new episodes will hit the network before the close of 2026. This shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise to longtime Fire Country fans, though, who have been enjoying 20+ new episodes every year since 2022.

It may be a few months before Fire Country Season 5 officially arrives, but things are finally starting to take shape. Earlier this year, it was confirmed that showrunner Tia Napolitano would step down from her duties at the end of Season 4, but the network has since tapped Eric Guggenheim to take over her role as showrunner. Guggenheim is best known for his work on other hit procedurals like Magnum P.I. and Hawaii Five-0. Fire Country fans have been dealt a blow this weekend when it was reported that Season 5 has received a shorter order, with the network only green-lighting 13 episodes as opposed to its regular 20. NCIS: Origins and Matlock have also suffered the same fate. This is reportedly not due to any major setbacks or apprehensions about the future of these shows, but rather a desire from CBS to fit more scripted shows into its 2026–2027 slate after a record year in 2025.



















































Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz
Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In?
The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs

Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.

🚨The Pitt

🏥ER

💉Grey’s

🔬House

🩺Scrubs

01

A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct?
Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.





02

Why did you go into medicine in the first place?
The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.





03

What do you actually want from the people you work with?
Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.





04

You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it?
Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.





05

How would your colleagues describe the way you work?
Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.





06

How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure?
Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.





07

What does this job cost you personally?
Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?





08

At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back?
The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.





Your Assignment Has Been Made
You Belong In…

Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.


Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center

The Pitt

You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.

  • You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
  • You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
  • You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
  • Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.


County General Hospital, Chicago

ER

You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.

  • You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
  • You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
  • You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
  • ER is television about endurance. You have it.


Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle

Grey’s Anatomy

You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.

  • You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
  • Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
  • You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
  • It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.


Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ

House

You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.

  • You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
  • You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
  • Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
  • The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.


Sacred Heart Hospital, California

Scrubs

You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.

  • You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
  • You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
  • You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
  • Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.

What Is ‘Fire Country’ About?

Fire Country follows a former young convict, Bode Donovan (played by Max Thieriot), who joins a firefighting program designed to shorten the sentence of convicted felons. However, upon joining this reform program, he finds the family he’s always been searching for, and the one who may just be able to keep him out of any more trouble. In addition to starring in the show, Max Thieriot is also one of the head writers and creators of Fire Country, along with Tony Phelan and Joan Rater.

Check out all episodes of Fire Country on Paramount+ following their premiere on CBS and stay tuned to Collider for more updates and coverage on the future of the series.


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Release Date

October 7, 2022

Showrunner

Tia Napolitano


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Adam Blevins
Almontather Rassoul

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