‘NCIS’: Rocky Carroll on ‘Hawai’i’ Cancellation & Franchise Future — Could He Appear on Tiva Spinoff?
The NCIS franchise continues to expand—but not every show can last nearly as long as the mothership. Hawai’i, currently in its third season, will be ending with the May 6 episode.
“I was shocked” by the news of its cancellation, NCIS star Rocky Carroll tells TV Insider. “Less than two weeks ago, I was doing a talk show with Vanessa Lachey and LL COOL J. We were all sitting around celebrating being a part of the NCIS universe. You never know what the motivating factors are, but I’m hoping that those characters, because we still have the mothership as we call it, we still have NCIS: Sydney, and who knows, those characters may turn up. I mean, LL COOL J’s character came from Los Angeles and was in Hawai’i. So who’s to say that Vanessa Lachey’s character wouldn’t show up somewhere in the NCIS universe again?”
There are at least two more series coming, the Origins prequel about a younger Gibbs (played by Austin Stowell, with Mark Harmon narrating) and Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo reprising their roles of Tony and Ziva in an untitled spinoff. “I’m thrilled about [the expansion], and I think it’s a real testament to the staying power and the commitment of CBS Paramount to have this show be sort of the staple that we now have a brand that’s expanding,” Carroll says. “It’s like the Marvel universe now. New audiences, new generations of audiences can now have their show that they can say, ‘Yeah, I’ve been with it since season one,’ like the diehards from NCIS who are 22 years in now.”
With Carroll playing the director of the agency, while neither Tony nor Ziva remains with NCIS, it would be quite easy for him to appear in a video check-in, right? “It’s funny you should mention it. I just did a podcast with Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo, and we had a chat about that, and I said, ‘Who knows? Sometimes the director may need to come in and check in on you kids because you’re on the other side of the world here,'” shares Carroll. “That would be kind of fun. Video check-in would be nice. I’d like to see their faces when Vance just walks into the room.”
But is there a spinoff he’d like to see in the franchise? He points out that there are divisions of the agency that have been introduced, like the REACT team. “The thing that made NCIS so interesting to begin with is [creator] Don Bellisario picked a federal agency that most people had no idea what NCIS stood for or what it was,” Carroll notes. “There’s all these other parts of this federal agency that you could focus on as opposed to just NCIS: Costa Rica—which wouldn’t be bad. I wouldn’t mind having Vance’s retirement job being a director in a small office in Costa Rica somewhere.”
Not every attempt at a spinoff has been a success; Los Angeles Season 4 introduced Red, the mobile unit, but that wasn’t ordered to series. “There’s never any guarantee,” according to Carroll. “But the universe has this solid footing now that you can take a chance, take a leap of faith, and say, ‘Well, let’s try it and see what happens.’ You know that the universe is still going to be safe, still going to exist.”
After all, NCIS is still going, even three seasons after its lead, Mark Harmon, exited. “There were star-driven shows in the ’70s and the ’80s. It was the name above the title and then the show.” Carroll recalls. “But now what CBS had done—and Harmon was a big factor in this, too, he always wanted the agency to be the star of the show. And CBS has been successful with other shows like CSI; once Billy Petersen left CSI, people thought, ‘Well, he was the main character behind it,’ but the show still had life after that. Because it was about the agency. And I think that’s one of the things that CBS does pretty much better than anybody else.”
What do you think of the state of the NCIS franchise right now? Let us know in the comments section, below.
NCIS, Season 21 Finale, Monday, May 6, 9/8c, CBS
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