‘NCIS’ Preview Reveals First Look at Tony as Director — What to Expect

NCIS may have kicked off its 24th season with a major change — Tony (Michael Weatherly) is now the agency’s director! — but the promo for the second episode (airing October 13) shows something very familiar for the former very special agent.

The video preview, which you can watch above, begins with Tony giving a speech about how, “Your job is to solve cases. My job is to make sure nothing gets in your way.” Then we see him back in an interrogation room, alongside Knight (Katrina Law) as Parker (Gary Cole) and Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) observe. And to Tony’s surprise, Knight throws away his latte. When he asks why, she tells him, “That was your third of the day, and you’re capped at one.” As Parker puts it, “This could be fun actually.”

That moment actually isn’t too surprising, given what showrunner Steven D. Binder told TV Insider: “I won’t tell you exactly why yet you’ll see it, but Knight sort of adopts a mother hen role towards Tony, making sure that he’s sticking to his diet and things like that.” This is likely just the first of a series of similar moments then.

Erik Voake/CBS

As for his dynamics with the rest of the team, Binder said “that’s where the fun is” that we’ll start to see in this next episode. “The nut to crack about this, is what is his relationship with all these other characters because this has always been a relationship show, and we cover the gamut. Parker and Tony, we are thinking of them as two people on a first date, getting to know each other, laughing at each other’s jokes, getting a little awkward maybe.”

He continued, “Obviously Jimmy Palmer [Brian Dietzen] and Tony have known each other for a while, but we redefine their dynamic in a really fun way and you’ll see that in number two. And then the big one is McGee [Sean Murray] and Tony because their relationship initially was probie and frat boy who was hazing him. They’re both a lot older now. They’re both parents. They’re going to relate to each other on a much different level.”

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When it came to making Tony the new director, the showrunner explained it was about figuring out his role on the show once they knew Weatherly was returning: “We don’t want him back in the bullpen being a regular agent. First of all, there’s not enough chairs. And do we create a second team for him? There’s not enough chairs again. And Gary Cole‘s fantastic as a team leader, so what do we really do with this character? And it just seemed like the kid who pulls the fire alarm in high school and you come back and he’s the principal, that just seemed like the right move for that character. We get to showcase his maturity and yet he also still gets to be quintessentially Tony DiNozzo. That just seemed like a great internal conflict for him to be the director and then really fun for the audience to watch as well.”

As for the case in this next episode, titled “Clean Slate,” CBS teases, “When a man is murdered after a neighborhood dinner party, the team discovers every guest is lying – about the strange break-in at the victim’s house, what they were burning in their backyards and who they really are. And the deeper the team digs, the less they can agree on what kind of case they’re even working.” Should be a fun one for Tony’s first case as director!

But will this be connected to the overarching bad guy that Binder teased for us? He said that in the second episode, “We are going to introduce something in there that will set the stage for something happening, and it will be large enough that it’ll be a director level event as well. It won’t just be — in the past, we’ve had the Port-to-Port Killer [Kerr Smith‘s Jonas Cobb], and it was just a serial killer we were chasing. This will be a little bigger, stakes are going to be a little higher, and that will be clear what that is by Episode 2.”

What do you think of Tony as director? Let us know in the comments section below.

NCIS, Tuesdays, 8/7c, CBS