Next month, NCIS will premiere its 22nd season on the 2024 TV schedule, making it one of the longest-running prime-time procedurals. Many actors have come and gone from the popular CBS show over the decades, including Michael Weatherly, who starred as Anthony DiNozzo in its first 13 seasons, then briefly reprised the role earlier this year for Season 21’s David McCallum tribute episode. However, from what Weatherly recalls, it took a remarkably long time for CBS to “know what they had” with NCIS and start marketing it properly.
While Weatherly and Ziva David actress Cote de Pablo were speaking with director Dennis Smith on Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch, they recollected on the Season 7 premiere, “Truth or Consequences”, which saw Tony, McGee and Gibbs infiltrating a prison camp in Somalia to rescue Ziva. This involved Tony being captured by the bad guys and being administered truth serum during his interrogation, and there was a line Weatherly improvised that CBS liked enough to use in an advertisement. The actor explained:
I was under the truth serum. I knew that I was scared to death… but I also knew that Gibbs was somewhere, that I knew I had the angel somewhere. So I had the confidence of somebody who's like, ‘Do whatever you want to me. It's not going to end well for you, but you do whatever you want.’ So at one point, he hit me and I said, ‘Can I get a glass of chardonnay? Because that would go so well with the taste of blood I have in my mouth’ or whatever. And they actually cut that into the commercial, the ad lib about asking for a glass of chardonnay.
Obviously NCIS had been successful enough up to this point, otherwise it would have been cancelled years earlier. But as Michael Weatherly went on to say, this ad for “Truth or Consequences” was the first time he felt that CBS was delivering the right kind of advertising for the show, and I’m astounded it took over half a decade to his this point. In his opinion, the ads from the previous six seasons failed to represent NCIS as more than just a traditional procedural. As he put it:
I really felt that that was when the network knew what they had. And they were cutting trailers for the next week's episode, which I would geek out on as well, 'cause I would watch the cuts. ‘Cause in the beginning, I would be like, ‘These people don't even watch the show.’ They're cutting together these these trailers for next week. ‘On Navy NCIS, the team encounters a…. the crime is their battlefield.’ I'm like, ‘This is not the show.’
Earlier in this Off Duty episode, Michael Weatherly explained that he thinks NCIS is different from other procedurals like FBI and Law & Order because at times it functions as a workplace comedy, other times it emulates a romantic thriller, the list goes on. But because of those earlier ads, not only did Weatherly feel CBS didn’t do a good job promoting NCIS up until Season 7, people who’d only heard about it, yet never watched it, got the wrong idea about his experience working on the show. As he explained:
I would do interviews sometimes when people would say, ’It must be so difficult. You seem to have a very exuberant energy and a sense of humor just to be in a crime procedural all the time. Do you do you get bored?’ And I'm like, ‘Yeah, you haven't seen the show.’ I've never been bored on that set. It's how I was able to do 13 years, because I didn't get bored.
13 years is a good run for any actor on the show, and after departing from NCIS’ main cast, he stuck around on CBS to lead Bull for six seasons. Now Michael Weatherly is back to playing Tony DiNozzo as a lead character again, as he and Cote de Pablo are filming the upcoming spinoff NCIS: Tony and Ziva in Budapest. Unlike the other NCIS shows, this series will be a Paramount+ subscription-exclusive offering rather than air on CBS first.
We’ll let you know when NCIS: Tony & Ziva’s premiere date is announced. For now, you can keep yourself entertained within this TV franchise by keeping up NCIS Season 22 and the Leroy Jethro Gibbs-focused prequel NCIS: Origins once they premiere Monday, October 14.
