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For a show to reach double-digit seasons is rare. For one to be going into its 21st is quite the achievement, one that NCIS reaches this year (the franchise also hits its 1,000th episode on April 15). And it sounds very unlikely that it will be its last.
“I don’t see it slowing down anytime soon. It’s a fantastic cast with a fantastic writing staff that’s been there a really long time. They’re just as reenergized today as they were as when I started on the show in Season 8 [as current executive],” CBS‘ Entertainment President Amy Reisenbach told Deadline. “So, as long as they want to keep it going, we’re thrilled to be on the NCIS train. Gary [Cole] and Wilmer [Valderrama] and Sean [Murray] and Katrina [Law], all of them, they love doing the show. So we hope to continue on for quite a while.”
At one point, it would’ve been impossible to imagine NCIS continuing without Mark Harmon leading as Leroy Jethro Gibbs. But then he left in Season 19 (Gibbs moved to Alaska), Cole came in, and the show is still going. It has also led to quite a few spinoffs: two that have ended (New Orleans and Los Angeles), the ongoing Hawai’i, the first international one Sydney, and the upcoming Origins.
Sydney wrapped its first season in January, ending on quite the cliffhanger, with JD (Todd Lasance) allowing the criminal the team had been after all season to get away as a result of what he did to save his kidnapped son, and Mackey (Olivia Swann) realizing that Rankin (Lewis Fitz-Gerald) has some connection to the enemy after JD used the kidnapper’s phone to call “a friend” and that number was the DOD official’s. Well, it sounds like we could very well get some resolution to that.
“We’re thrilled with how NCIS: Sydney did. It’s not just a win for CBS but it’s really a win for all of Paramount, for Paramount+, for CBS Studios and Paramount International,” Reisenbach said to Deadline. “I feel really positive and there will be news to come soon.”
The upcoming Origins brings Harmon back to the world of NCIS, as a narrator for the prequel about Gibbs in 1991 as he starts his career as a newly minted special agent at the fledgling NCIS Camp Pendleton office where he forges his place on a gritty, ragtag team led by NCIS legend Mike Franks.
“NCIS: Origins is really different” from the rest of the franchise, according to Reisenbach. “It makes me feel so old to say it’s period when it’s set in the ’90s. … It’s a little edgier and grittier” and has “a serialized element of it that we’re really excited about.”
We are, too—and we have a good feeling about the possibility of three NCIS shows once again being part of CBS’ primetime lineup, starting next season.