Getting a pilot for a TV show ordered is hard enough to do, and it only gets more difficult for said show to make it through its first season without being cancelled. Lasting multiple seasons? Even harder. But running for over two decades? That’s a rare feat, albeit one that NCIS has pulled off on CBS. Debuting in 2003 as a spinoff of JAG, the procedural is now airing its 22nd season on the 2024 TV schedule, with many actors and behind-the-scenes talent coming and going from it over the decades. Shane Brennan is one of those people, and the executive producer shared that there was a specific episode that had NCIS fans freaking out, but made him realize that the series was “going to be safe.”
Brennan stopped by Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch to talk with hosts Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo about his work on both NCIS, which the actors starred in once upon a time as Tony DiNozzo and Ziva David, respectively, as well as its first spinoff, NCIS: Los Angeles, which he created. After discussing when he became sure that Los Angeles would be around for a while, he then went over how he came to the same realization on the flagship show, and it stemmed from an episode he wrote. Brennan started off by saying:
On NCIS, I knew that that was going to happen at the season finale of Season 5. Judgement Day Part 1 and 2… I knew NCIS was in for a long run because the finale for that season aired on the East Coast. It finished airing as I was getting on a plane in LA to fly back to Australia for the hiatus, and CBS publicity phoned me in the in the lounge room at LAX and said, ‘The show's just finished airing on the East Coast and the fan forum, it's exploded. There have been 10,000 comments already and they hate you.You've just fired everyone. The new director’s come in and fired everyone. What are you doing to the show?’ And I said, ‘No, it'll be fine.’
Both parts of “Judgement Day” aired on May 20, 2008, and the first part ended with the death of Lauren Holly’s Jenny Shepard, who’d been the NCIS Director since the start of Season 3. But what Shane Brennan is specifically referring to above is how at the end of the second part, Rocky Carroll’s Leon Vance, who became the new Director, broke up Leroy Jethro Gibbs’ team by making Tony DiNozzo an agent afloat, transferring McGee to the cyber crime division, and terminating Ziva’s liaison status and sending her back to Israel. As for Gibbs, he was given a dossier containing the names of the agents who would comprise his new team, although it wasn’t until the Season 6 premiere that we learned their identities. (Fun fact, Carroll was also pranked by Mark Harmon during the shooting of this scene.)
That was enough to get so many fans filed up online that it caught the intention of CBS’ publicity department. But the fun didn’t stop there, with Shane Brennan continuing:
So I fly for 15 hours, I get off the plane in Melbourne, I turn on my phone; a dozen calls from from publicity, I phoned them back. ‘There are now 50,000 comments and everyone is freaking out. You're going to have to put out a statement.’ And I thought, 50,000 people just watched an hour of TV and were so involved, engaged in it that they actually went on a forum and wrote something, even if it was, ‘We hate you, what are you doing to our show?’ They were engaged. And I knew at that point this show's going to go for forever. Because I knew what was, I knew what I was doing. I was teasing everyone. I was trying to get them to get angry and to come back. And our numbers kept going up afterwards, of course, but they all came back to see what was going to happen. That's what you did at the end of the show. So I knew at that point, I knew the show was going to be safe. I didn't think the 22 seasons. I was thinking, yeah, it'll probably run for another 10 years.
Of course, it didn’t take long for the gang to get back together early on in NCIS Season 6, but months before that, seeing how many fans were passionately reacting to how “Judgement Day” ended convinced Shane Brennan that the procedural would continue running for a long time. However, like he said at the end, he had no idea the show would still be on the air to this day. Brennan stuck around NCIS as an executive producer until 2015, splitting his time those last six years with NCIS: Los Angeles, which ended up running for 14 seasons.
Brennan remains involved in the world of NCIS as the creator of NCIS: Sydney, which is returning for its second season on Friday, January 31, 2025. Just like with the flagship show and NCIS: Origins, new episodes will first air on CBS, then become streamable with a Paramount+ subscription. Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo will also be taking center stage for the upcoming spinoff NCIS: Tony & Ziva, which will be exclusively available on the same streaming platform.
