With NCIS in the middle of its 22nd season on the 2024 TV schedule, and having launched a successful procedural franchise, it’s easy to forget that long ago, it was a spinoff of another popular CBS show. Back in 2003, the legal series JAG aired two episodes in its eighth season called “Ice Queen” and “Meltdown”, which served as the backdoor pilot for NCIS. Two decades later, Mark Horowitz, who was an executive producer on NCIS until last year and a co-executive producer on JAG, recalled the former show’s beginnings and the steps that were taken to distance itself from the latter series, which included the pitch to CBS being described as “Law & Order in the Navy.”
How NCIS Ended Up Not Just Copying Law & Order
In addition to discussing the levels of secrecy that went into bringing back Cote de Pablo’s Ziva David at the end of Season 16, Horowitz recalled the origins of NCIS (not to be confused with the prequel series NCIS: Origins) while talking with de Pablo and Tony DiNozzo actor Michael Weatherly on Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch, the podcast they host together. The executive producer started off by saying:
My recollection is that it was pitched to CBS as Law & Order in the Navy. And if you remember those spinoffs, that's sort of how those shows went. There was a crime and NCIS would be the cops, and they'd come in and they'd deal with the crime for the first half of the show, and then a new set of young, happening JAG attorneys would then take over and prosecute the case. That was actually the original pitch, and that's kind of how those two episodes worked.
Remember that at the time NCIS was starting, the original Law & Order had been running for over a decade, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit had been airing for a little under half a decade, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent was two season into its run. There’s a world where NCIS could have just ended up as CBS’ carbon copy of the popular NBC procedural franchise, and maybe it would have still been successful, but co-creator Don Bellisario wasn’t interested in going that route. Horowitz continued:
And then Don [Bellisario]… he had his finger on the pulse of this stuff. You got to totally give him all the credit for this. He's watching this and realized, I think, what he really had in this in this cast and thought, ‘No, no, no, I'm not going to do that. I want all of them. I want these people all the time. I don't want to be mixing it up.’ And [he] created this whole new show, and there was a great deal of emphasis to make NCIS not look like JAG to keep to to make it a very separate show visually.
While there have been plenty of instances where legal representation gets involved with NCIS cases, and several JAG characters did return in NCIS: Los Angeles, the shows in this franchise have done well for themselves focusing exclusively on the agents and those within their close circle. You can see the evidence of that by streaming any of these shows with a Paramount+ subscription.
How NCIS Distanced Itself From JAG
But it wasn’t enough to steer clear from Law & Order territory; the original NCIS also wanted to differentiate itself from the look and feel of JAG, as noted in Mark Horowitz’s previous quote. He want on to explain how this was accomplished through the different shooting and editing styles, as well as the scripts being slightly shorter than average. In his words:
The Bourne Identity movies had come out. There were these fast cut, almost like rock video-style shooting for drama, kind of interesting. Man on Fire, those films are coming out, and JAG was done almost like a 1940s movie. It was very classic, classic shots and composition and big orchestra music, kind of kind of like an old ‘40s-style film. And the idea was for NCIS to be different and for it to attract perhaps a younger viewer and just to have a different look and feel so you had something else to go watch. Part of the challenge was that the script came in at 72 pages long. A normal script would have been 10 pages shorter than that 72-page script.
Mark Horowitz then told a specific story of Don Bellisario, who created NCIS with Don McGill, directing the first episode of the series, “Yankee White”, which was called back to in the franchise’s 1,000th episode. Cote de Pablo hadn’t joined the series yet, but Michael Weatherly was there alongside Mark Harmon, Sasha Alexander, Pauley Perrette and David McCallum, with all but Alexander having debuted their NCIS characters in the backdoor pilot from JAG. Horowitz explained:
I can remember Don directing “Yankee White,” and you guys would do a rehearsal and he'd say, ‘Ok, that's very good. Now do it twice as fast.’ He wanted all the material, he just didn't want to have to cut anything if he didn't have to. He would have you guys talk as fast as you possibly could, and we would shoot with three cameras all the time. I don't think you guys half the time even knew, ‘Ok, this is the close up camera and this is shooting wide and this one's carrying me back and forth.’ You just had to be on all the time. There was no, ‘Well, I'll wait till I get to my close up to give it.’
A lot has changed since NCIS first started airing, with none of the original main cast members still around, and Sean Murray’s Timothy McGee and Brian Dietzen’s Jimmy Palmer being the only Season 1 holdovers. Still, those instincts to tackle this series with a different approach than how backdoor pilot was handled paid off. Sure, backdoor pilot had a healthy run of 10 seasons, which is more than most TV shows get, but it’s safe to say its popularity was far surpassed by what its successor accomplished.
NCIS Season 22 will resume on Monday, January 27 at 9 pm ET on CBS, the same night that NCIS: Origins’ debut season will continue. The NCIS: Sydney Season 2 premiere will follow on Friday, January 31, and the Paramount+-exclusive series NCIS: Tony & Ziva is also expected to arrive on the 2025 TV schedule.
