Matthew Gray Gubler Says Einstein Is No Spencer Reid, Even If Both Men Are Geniuses

On paper, the comparison writes itself — which is exactly why Matthew Gray Gubler is getting ahead of it. The actor returns to CBS in Einstein, a new series in which he plays Lewis Einstein, a brilliant professor who helps police solve cases. For viewers who watched Gubler spend 15 years as Dr. Spencer Reid, the boy-genius profiler at the heart of Criminal Minds, the setup can sound familiar: another exceptionally smart man, another pile of impossible cases. In an interview with Deadline, the 46-year-old star made the case that the resemblance ends at the IQ.

As Gubler framed it, the two characters are both smart, but they are different kinds of smart people entirely — he compared them to two different species of tree that respond to the wind in completely different ways. Reid, in his telling, was cautious and obsessive, a man carrying a heavy weight through almost every scene: the traumas of the job, the toll of his personal life, the sheer burden of a mind that could never switch off. Lewis, by contrast, is the opposite temperament. Where Reid braced against the world, Lewis moves through it comfortably — relaxed in his own skin, happy by default, and untroubled in situations that would have sent Reid into a spiral of statistics and worry. Gubler also joked, in the Deadline conversation, about the irony of repeatedly being cast as geniuses when he does not consider himself especially smart in real life.

Who Lewis Einstein is

The premise gives that temperament somewhere to go. Lewis Einstein is the great-grandson of Albert Einstein, and he has inherited the famous family intellect without inheriting much urgency about using it. He lives comfortably as a tenured professor, largely coasting on a legendary surname. That changes when his own bad-boy antics land him in trouble with the law, and he is pressured into service: using his genius to help a local police detective work through her most puzzling cases. It is a classic procedural arrangement — the brilliant outsider paired with a working detective — but the character at its centre is built to enjoy himself inside it, rather than endure it.

That distinction matters for the tone CBS is selling. Criminal Minds was a dark show about violent crime, and Reid's brilliance was usually deployed under grim pressure, in rooms full of photographs of victims. Einstein, which comes from Andy Breckman and Randy Zisk, is positioned as a lighter vehicle: a case-of-the-week series with comedic undertones, built around a lead character whose problem is not that the world is too much for him, but that he has never had to try very hard at anything. Gubler is also a producer on the series, and the Deadline interview covered how he has been able to bring his other creative skills into the production, including designing the title sequence and incorporating his own drawings into the show — a personal stamp that underlines how differently this job is structured from his old one.

Fifteen years is a long shadow

None of this is to say the Reid comparison is unfair to raise. Gubler played Spencer Reid from 2005 until Criminal Minds ended its original CBS run in 2020, growing up on screen inside a single role across 15 seasons. Characters held that long tend to follow actors into every subsequent part, and audiences arrive with expectations already set. Gubler has not run from the role — he returned for a guest appearance in Criminal Minds: Evolution in 2025 — but Einstein is plainly the project where he establishes what comes next, on the same network, in a neighbouring genre, with a lead character designed to contrast with the one people know.

The series has also taken the long road to air. Einstein was originally positioned for the 2025-26 broadcast season before CBS pushed it to the 2026-27 season, a delay the network presented as a chance to develop the show properly rather than rush it onto a crowded schedule. The cast around Gubler has shifted during that wait as well: Melissa Fumero, best known as Amy Santiago on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, stepped in as the female lead, playing a sharp, disciplined New Jersey State Police detective inspector who demands a great deal from colleagues and even more from herself — and who has mixed feelings about being partnered with Professor Einstein. On paper, that pairing is the show in miniature: her discipline against his ease, her procedure against his improvisation.

Why the difference matters

For CBS, Einstein is a bet that a familiar face in a recognisably different register can anchor a new procedural — the genre the network still does better than anyone. For Gubler, it is a chance to find out whether audiences will let a beloved character go and meet a new one on his own terms. His argument, made cheerfully and repeatedly, is that anyone expecting Reid's anxieties in a new costume will be surprised within one episode: same network, same broad job description, entirely different man doing it. Keep up with the season's other premieres and casting news in our TV coverage, browse new and returning series in Browse, and see the rest of today's entertainment stories in the news feed.