With the exception of his cameo earlier this year in the NCIS episode honoring the late David McCallum, it’s been nearly a decade since Michael Weatherly starred as Tony DiNozzo on the popular CBS show. Fortunately for longtime NCIS fans, there are 13 seasons worth of Tony appearances that they can enjoy and easily stream with a Paramount+ subscription, with one of his best episodes being Season 5’s “Requiem.” However, former NCIS executive producer Shane Brennan revealed that the “Requiem” promo CBS initially cut failed to impress, so much so that it resulted in the TV show’s main team taking over advertising the episode.
Brennan shared this information while talking with Weatherly and Ziva David actress Cote de Pablo on their podcast Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch, with that conversation also including him sharing the backstory behind how he came up with NCIS: Los Angeles and revealing the NCIS episode that made him realize the the show was “going to be safe.” As far as the story behind the advertising of “Requiem” goes, Brennan started off by explaining why the CBS promo was not received well thusly:
We made that episode. We would get the promos for each episode about a week before us because they’d air at the end of of this show before. And we'd used to get them with about 24 hours notice and they'd just say, ‘Here's the promo, could you tick off tick it off?’ And they sent the promo through of that episode… and it's sepia. They've got an old fashioned sepia frame with lace work round it, and the promo was, ‘Someone from Gibbs’ past comes back to remind him of the daughter he's lost.’ And there were violins playing. I looked at them and went, ‘What the… They have missed the mark.’
Aired as NCIS Season 5’s seventh episode, “Requiem” followed Mark Harmon’s Leroy Jethro Gibbs reuniting with Maddie Tyler, the best friend of his late daughter, in a case that leads to her being kidnapped in an attempt to secure $4 million in stolen Iraqi aid money. However, Tony DiNozzo was arguably the episode’s standout character, as “Requiem” actually opened towards the end of the story by showing Michael Weatherly’s character diving into a bay to free Gibbs and Maddie from a submerged car and and then resuscitate them. However, rather than tease that big Tony moment in the “Requiem” promo, the CBS people instead cut together something straightforward, which did not please Shane Brennan. He continued:
So I got Roy Poole, [who] was the editor on that episode, and I said to Roy, ‘Roy, stop what you're doing. We're going to cut a promo.’ So we cut the promo with just the opening and selected pitch fading to black, pulling up another bit without anything else. And just at the end, we said, ‘Next Tuesday,’ that sort of thing. And I sent it back to them, and I waited for the explosion. Like, ‘What the fuck?’ They had a whole department to cut promos. I mean, that was their job. ‘How dare you!’ That's what I'm waiting for. And I get a phone call and they say, ‘We are so sorry, we totally missed this opportunity. This is the best program we've ever done, except we haven't done it.’ So what the promo ended up being was just the opening sequence where you give everything away in effect. But it is so compelling that I knew the audience would say, ‘I’ve got to watch that episode.’
While technically true that showing Tony’s heroic act in a promo gives away the episode’s biggest moment, I agree with Shane Brennan that it was the right decision to advertise it. Like he said, you show a snippet of Tony shooting some guys and diving into water to free the trapped Gibbs and Maddie from drowning, and a lot of viewers are going to want to learn the context behind what’s happening. And that’s not just me speculating on what happened back in 2007, because per The Futon Critic, “Requiem” ended up drawing 18.15 million viewers. At that time, it was NCIS’ second largest audience ever and was ultimately the most viewed episode of the season.
Head over to Paramount+ to view “Requiem,” whether it’s for the first time ever or as a rewatch, if you’re so inclined after reading this article. NCIS Season 22 will resume Monday, January 27 on the 2025 TV schedule. Don’t forget that Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo will also return to the NCIS-verse for their streaming-exclusive spinoff NCIS: Tony & Ziva.
