‘NCIS: Hawai’i’ EPs Tease ‘Fun & Crazy’ Premiere Crossover, Kacy & More in Season 2

What worked in NCIS: Hawai’i Season 1 was the nice balance of the agents’ personal lives with the cases, and that will continue. But first is the premiere crossover with NCIS.

Ahead of the first season’s release on DVD on September 6 — the bonus content includes featurettes, deleted and extended scenes, and a gag reel — TV Insider caught up with executive producers Jan Nash and Christopher Silber and got scoop on what’s next.

In Season 1, you found a balance in the cases and the agents’ personal lives. Will we get the same in Season 2?

Jan Nash: That balance is really important to us. We want the show to live in a space where we’re telling interesting crimes and we’re also learning about our characters, whether it’s through the case or through separate B or C stories. We liked the way that Season 1 went in that regard. I think we will continue to do that — in some episodes more, in some episodes less — but over the arc of the entirety of Season 2, our hope would be you learn new things about these characters and we would deepen the audience’s relationship with them in lots of different ways.

Chris, when I spoke with Jan about the finale in May, she said all credit for Kate’s [Tori Anderson] grand gesture goes to you and Matt [Bosack]. Talk about shaping the specifics, from the song to the reunion to Ernie [Jason Antoon]…

Christopher Silber: I appreciate the credit that she sent to me and Matt, I think it was a group effort without a doubt. The relationship between Whistler and Lucy [Yasmine Al-Bustami] had quite this dramatic arc. When we first meet Whistler, she was a very closed-off person who clearly made some poor choices in how she was interacting with Lucy and we realized the way that Lucy was now feeling guarded and hurt, there needed to be something big and something fun. We started talking about what would happen in a romantic comedy, and we wanted that kind of moment, that warm moment, and that’s when we came up with the idea. We talked about Say Anything, which in retrospect could seem a little creepy, standing out there, but to come to Jane Tennant’s [Vanessa Lachey] house and to make this grand gesture that was Ernie’s suggestion, though he wasn’t being literal… it all fell into place.

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We went through plenty of song options. We spent a lot of time trying to find the perfect thing. Some of it is capturing lightning in a bottle. We were really pleased. Everyone leaned in. Matt and I were there for shooting that scene. It was important to us it was the last scene we shot for the season, and it was a really touching moment. There were many tears from many of us watching, from the crew, from me, Matt, too.

Tori teased a more domestic Kate and Lucy. How is their relationship in Season 2? More honest?

Nash: We put them through the wringer in Season 1, and it does feel like having ended where we did, you have to honor that and show what it looks like if you actually make a commitment to move past whatever your fear is, into something more positive, and we are. Happiness is boring, but to the extent we can come up with dramatically interesting happiness, we are going to try to do that. But stories have to have a shape. You have to have a beginning, middle, and end, even in a story where you’re trying to reflect a good relationship, and so I think up until this point, we’ve managed to do that in some interesting ways.

You gradually brought Kate into the fold of the team in Season 1, but she’s still on the outside a bit. She’s not NCIS and she’s dealing with different aspects of cases. How are you looking at her role in Season 2?

Silber: You’re exactly right. We brought her in, she was always sort of this outsider, someone who was a bit of a foil to our team, and we gradually adjusted that through Season 1, having her transfer to become an FBI agent from [the] DIA and learn what it’s like to be in the field. For us, introducing her through Lucy and having her adjust through her relationship with Lucy was step 1, and step 2 is integrating her into the team, into the family that is our team — even though she’s an FBI agent — [and] really starting to see her hold her own place amongst the others, not just as the one Lucy’s with but someone who is recognized as a contributing member, even as extended family of the team.

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Nash: We are at various moments alluding to the jurisdictional issues and there are those. NCIS and the FBI are not the same organizations. They do have different responsibilities. There will be some of that friction. But we do want each of the people doing casework on the show to have unique points of view on the way you pursue a case.

Ultimately, Jane Tennant is responsible for the cases that will be shown for the most part, because they will always be NCIS cases. It’s possible that we will have cases that will fall in other jurisdictions and that can create different complications, but at the end of the day, they do report to different people and Tennant has to be responsible for her group and Whistler is outside that, though we don’t want inter-jurisdictional fighting. That’s, for the most part, pretty dull. Hopefully as it goes, we’ll continue to grow that relationship with Tennant and the team and it’ll just be about the personalities of the people rather than where they work.

Jan, you previously said Jane and Joe’s future was about Enver Gjokaj’s availability…

Nash: He is a super-talented guy and he got another job, so he has not been available to us at the beginning part of this season. But we are hopeful that as what is currently his day job winds down that we’ll be able to see him again. We love him. Enver is a great guy. He is great as Joe Milius, we love that dynamic, so we’re hopeful.

Where did you want to leave Jane at the end of Season 1 for her personal life in Season 2 because you have to take that into account?

Silber: We wanted Season 1 to have a happy note and this feeling of ohana and what’s important to Jane Tennant is her family: her personal family, her work family, and in many ways, they’re one and the same. For Season 2, we need to challenge that a little bit. We need to see how strong that family is as we throw obstacles at it, and that’s in her personal life: dealing with a son who is coming of age and maybe leaving the nest soon, dealing with her love life, Joe Milius coming in and out, maybe some other folks, maybe flirtations here or there, and dealing with some of the problems of her team members’ personal lives that will draw her in as well. Season 2, to a certain extent, thematically is about what do you do to keep your family together when parts of it are pulling at the seams?

Karen Neal/CBS

Your new season kicks off with the NCIS crossover. What can you tease?

Nash: It’s super fun. It’s got a lot of really cool elements. We are finishing a five, six episode-arc for the mothership, and hopefully the fans of the mothership will feel that we did that in an interesting way. There’s a lot of scope. There’s a lot going on. It’s lot of team members going back and forth.

Silber:  On both the crossovers that we have now done, we of course strive to make the storyline super interesting. But we’re all coming to see how the two teams interact with each other. Whatever the bad guy of the day might be, however dastardly their plan might be, watching these two teams interact with each other, admire each other, learn from each other, flirt with each other, that’s the fun of it.

Knight [Katrina Law] and Torres [Wilmer Valderrama] are once again coming to Hawai’i. What worked in last season’s crossover that you kept in mind?  

Silber: The chemistry between Vanessa and Wilmer was fantastic. They’ve known each other a long time, so they were really excited to work together, and you could see those sparks. That was something we felt fairly strongly was going to work out. We were pleasantly surprised when Katrina came — obviously she had experience in Hawai’i. To see her chemistry with our team and especially with Ernie was magical. We figured let’s lean into what we know works really well.

Nash: Gary Cole is also in our episode, and he’s just terrific, too.

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Speaking of, Parker’s in the middle of the Raven case. What can you tease?

Silber: As crazy as it’s been in the few episodes that it’s been on the mothership, it will have an equally fun and crazy ending.

What’s next with Kai [Alex Tarrant] and his father?

Silber: Kai’s relationship with the island itself and with his family and with his friend has not been resolved yet. We’re going to continue to allow Kai to re-find his connection to the island through friends, through family, and also through adversaries. We get to spend a little bit more time in dealing with that reintroduction to Hawai’i.

Jesse [Noah Mills] tried to get time away from work with his daughter, and then pirates. Will we see more of that?

Nash: I don’t think anyone’s going to be abducted by pirates this year, but I cannot promise you that Jesse will not have situations that are fraught. The pirate episode was really satisfying and he did such a good job. We would be stupid not to put him in situations where he can show those layers, whether it’s directly with his own family or with other characters that he needs to protect and take care of, so I think we will definitely lean into some of that.

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For the most part, Season 1 had cases-of-the-week. Are you following that format in Season 2?

Nash: We think the case-of-the-week works for us because what we want to have, to the extent that the show can hold it, is arcing personal stories. I think if we start arcing cases and arcing personal stories, we quickly become something that’s serialized and requires the audience to show up every week or to put a “Previously on NCIS: Hawai’i” on the front, which I hate. So I think that the case-of-the-week, for the most part, is going to be the way we go, just because it works for us because we want to do these character stories.

NCIS: Hawai’i, Season 2 Premiere, Monday, September 19, 10/9c, CBS