Why ‘NCIS’ Still Rules TV
It doesn’t take a team of federal agents to figure out that if you picked up this magazine, you’re probably one of the 300 million people from around the world who watched some version of NCIS last year. That’s just a smidge under the entire population of the United States.
The massive fandom around the military procedural, which reigns as the most watched drama on broadcast TV, began in 2003 with a spectacular series premiere from cocreators Donald P. Bellisario and Don McGill. The episode, inspired by the 1997 movie Air Force One, introduced what would become the show’s signature recipe of action, emotion, and a dash of humor when agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon) and Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard (David McCallum) investigate a mysterious death aboard the presidential plane.
We fell in love with Gibbs’ gruffness (OK, his good looks didn’t hurt either) and Ducky’s intellect. We were intrigued by the twisty case and fascinated by an agency we’d never heard of: the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which solves crimes involving the Navy and Marine Corps.
The distinct characters back at HQ sealed the deal. The original cast included a roundup of agents with lovable quirks: by-the-book profiler Caitlin Todd (Sasha Alexander), flirtatious Tony DiNozzo (Michael Weatherly), and tech geek Tim McGee (Sean Murray). In the lab, we got the unexpected goth/nerd forensic specialist Abby Sciuto (Pauley Perrette) and Ducky’s dedicated and sensitive assistant Jimmy Palmer (Brian Dietzen).
Over the years, NCIS built a reliable world that we could return to every week. It was governed by “Gibbs’ Rules,” practical guidelines for successfully solving cases and living life (new ones popped up all the time). We got to know our beloved characters better through eye-opening backstories, sometimes revealing tragic incidents. There were in-office rivalries and romances. (Tony and Ziva [Cote de Pablo] forever! — their story will continue in a new spinoff) Recognizable baddies kept coming back for more until the agents took them out—as we cheered them on from our sofas.
And those agents handled it all with the qualities expected at the real-life U.S. Naval Academy: “competence, character, compassion.” In a tumultuous world, it was a comfort to hang out at Navy Yard HQ in the bullpen, aka “the big orange room,” with decent folks like that.
As with any workplace, people have come and gone. Some we lost tragically. Others opted to move on. Saying goodbye to Gibbs when he retired in 2021 was the hardest. But NCIS has a way of reinventing itself. The new team leader, Alden Parker (Gary Cole), is more gregarious than the taciturn Gibbs, but as we’ve learned since he arrived, like his predecessor, he’s got plenty from his past that haunts him.
Bringing to life the multilayered characters of NCIS are writers, producers and crew, many of them with the show for decades. (Some even worked on JAG, the military legal drama from which NCIS spun off.) They’ve expanded into multiple spinoffs: NCIS: Los Angeles, NCIS: New Orleans and NCIS: Hawai‘i. The latest, NCIS: Sydney, debuted in November 2023.
Speaking to the deep staying power of not just the format but the characters, a forthcoming prequel, NCIS: Origins, will tell the story of a young Gibbs. Mark Harmon’s son Sean played the junior Leroy in NCIS flashbacks, but the new series will cast a different actor. Both Harmons will serve as executive producers.
The possibilities for the future of NCIS are endless. Bring on the milestone 1,000th episode of the franchise, coming in April!
This is an excerpt from TV Guide Magazine’s NCIS: Special Collector’s Edition issue. For more inside scoop on the long-running CBS franchise, pick up a copy of the issue available on newsstands and for order online at NCISMagazine.com.
