NCIS: Sydney Returns This Week, And The Showrunner Opened Up To Us About How Season 2 ‘Swung For The Fences,’ Which Involves A 'Revelatory' Mackey Reveal

Olivia Swann as Michelle Mackey in NCIS: Sydney Season 2

(Image credit: Paramount+)

Fans of the NCIS franchise can now look forward to this corner of CBS’ procedural landscape being present two nights a week on the 2025 TV schedule. In addition to the flagship series and the prequel NCIS: Origins both continuing to air on Monday nights, this Friday, NCIS: Sydney Season 2 will debut, arriving a little over a year after Season 1 ended. Ahead of the Australia-set spinoff’s return, CinemaBlend learned from showrunner Morgan O’Neill about how Sydney Season 2 “swung for the fences,” and that will include an important reveal concerning Olivia Swann’s Michelle Mackey.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with O’Neill about what’s coming up in the first chunk of NCIS: Sydney Season 2, which will continue to be streamable with a Paramount+ subscription. I began the interview by asking him what the big goal was he and his team were looking to accomplish with the second season, particularly if there any ways the show would be elevated or stand out from what was shown Season 1. He answered:

Yeah, look, we sat down at the very beginning of planning of Season 2, and we said, ‘Look, Season 1 was pretty good, but what are some ways that in every facet of the show that we deliver, we could be bigger, bolder, more risky? Where we can blow up the production value even further, where we can take these characters on a journey that is even more thrilling, where we can raise the stakes, where we can make the stakes more personal? Every little facet of of the show that we could look at, we wanted to make sure that we were supercharging… We’ve really swung for the fences on a couple of those episodes.

Morgan O’Neill then mentioned how the “stakes are gargantuan” in Season 2’s second episode. Obviously he didn’t go so far as to reveal specific story details, but that episode will explore how Australia is “the world's largest island sitting in the middle of the world's most contested patch of ocean,” and as such is “the geopolitical hotspot in terms of various ideologies banging up against one another. However, those who are fans of Mackey definitely won’t want to miss the Season 2 premiere, as something big is revealed about the NCIS Special Agent-in-Charge for the show. As O’Neill put it:

… Without spoiling anything from the very first episode of the second season, we start to learn things about our characters that are kind of revelatory. What we learn about Mackie in that first episode then colors everything that we've seen before and everything that we see afterwards because there's a facet of her character that we simply weren't given access to. And now that we can see through that lens, she's a different person, and a lot of the decisions she's making can be seen in a different light.

Of course, Olivia Swann will once again be joined in NCIS: Sydney’s main cast by Todd Lasance, Sean Sagar, Tuuli Narkle, Mavournee Hazel and William McInnes. They also won’t be lacking in opportunities to shine in Sydney Season 2, and Morgan O’Neill welcomed the opportunity to explore their characterizations more deeply, explaining:

And for me, it really deepens our understanding of these characters and what makes them tick, and at the same time, it makes them a lot more vulnerable. Because when you learn stuff that's important to someone, that's both takes you closer to them, but it also opens them up to all sorts of danger because they're the things that we keep hidden from the world, right? For good reason. And so each of our characters across the second season, to a greater or lesser extent, allows the audience in a little bit more, and feel like it really elevates the second season to an emotional place that we hadn't really touched on in the 1st.

NCIS: Sydney scored its Season 2 renewal in March 2024, roughly a month and a half after Season 1 concluded. When we left off with these characters, it was revealed that Colonel Rankin was tied to the man who kidnapped JD’s son Jack. Season 2 will explore the aftermath of this twist while dropping that big Mackey reveal, so how’s that for a grand return?

As for awaits the rest of the season, you’ll just need to either NCIS: Sydney Fridays at 8 pm on CBS, or stream it on Paramount+ afterwards, to find out.

Connoisseur of Marvel, DC, Star Wars, John Wick, MonsterVerse and Doctor Who lore, Adam is a Senior Content Producer at CinemaBlend. He started working for the site back in late 2014 writing exclusively comic book movie and TV-related articles, and along with branching out into other genres, he also made the jump to editing. Along with his writing and editing duties, as well as interviewing creative talent from time to time, he also oversees the assignment of movie-related features. He graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in Journalism, and he’s been sourced numerous times on Wikipedia. He's aware he looks like Harry Potter and Clark Kent.