‘NCIS: Sydney’ Boss Details ‘Challenge’ of Mackey & JD Getting Together: ‘It Ruins Everything’

NCIS: Sydney is putting the pressure on the team — NCIS and AFP agents working together — in its second season, so what better way than to bond two of them together in a new way first? Such is the case with Mackey (Olivia Swann) and JD (Todd Lasance), after she opened up to him and revealed she has a son back in the United States, in the premiere.

“The first season of the show was about building this blended family, bringing these kind of disparate misfits together, and seeing if we could somehow find a bond that would actually hold them together under stress. And I think by the end of the first season, we got to that point where we really felt like almost unexpectedly these guys had bonded into what is a team, a family. So the second season is all about putting that family under pressure, under seismic pressure to see whether those bonds can hold,” executive producer Morgan O’Neill tells TV Insider.

“One of the things that we wanted to do was to make sure that part of the jeopardy in that family was that we learn more about each other as a family. And it was important to us that Mackey and JD in particular share a secret that they and only they hold,” he continues.

Mackey’s confession about her son came when both she and JD were on their outs with their respective agencies and continuing to work the case at hand. She then says she wouldn’t have told him if not for what was going on at the time. The executive producer promises that we’ll see her son at some point but also reminds us how long it took to find out who Kelly was to Gibbs (Mark Harmon) on NCIS: “In the very first episode of the very first show, we find Gibbs in the basement working on a wooden boat, and you see the name tag on the wooden boat, and it’s not until several seasons later that you realize the name tag is the name of his dead daughter.”

For O’Neill, this was about digging deeper into the character of Mackey and using the research he did into women in the military and their “unique sacrifice”: The period of time when they’d hit their strides in their career is when they’d typically have children (25-40).

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“It’s a really tricky juggle,” he says. When it comes to Mackey specifically, “It just humanized her for me in a way that few other revelations could. What I love about the fact that she’s got a kid is that we can then go back and watch their first season again and realize so many nuances about the decisions that she was making because she’s doing it as a mother. I love TV when things deepen and you’re allowed to rewind the clock and go back and reanalyze things and look at things afresh and realize that there’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s happening under the surface that you weren’t privy to the first time ’round.”

Now that she’s told JD, that “really adds a layer to their relationship that didn’t exist beforehand, and hopefully at that point you watch everything that they do, all of their interactions, all of the subtleties about leading this team with a different lens,” he says.

As is the case with procedurals and partners, there’s always the question of whether or not they’ll get together. “It’s a challenge,” O’Neill admits. “Anyone who’s ever worked in a workplace or an office has confronted the exact situation Mackey and JD are in. He’s coming out of a divorce, he’s living in a friend’s garage. She’s single in a foreign country. They’re both working 60 hours a week shoulder to shoulder. They’re both frankly hot.”

However, he says, “The challenge is you can’t go there. It ruins everything. One of you has to leave the office, someone gets fired, who knows what. So the challenge of that blossoming into a romantic relationship is very real. Does that stop them potentially from finding moments that spark? Probably not. Is there a potential for it to be more than that? I guess we’ll have to wait and see, but I would suggest that whatever is simmering under the surface of their relationship definitely has the potential to spark up into something that is dangerous within the context of an organization like the one they work in and they’ll probably do everything they can to avoid it. Not to be too coy about it, but we’ll just have to see how good they are at ignoring it.”

What do you think? Do you want Mackey and JD to get together? Let us know in the comments section below.

NCIS: Sydney, Fridays, 8/7c, CBS