NCIS (2003)
From murder and espionage to terrorism and stolen submarines, a team of special agents investigates any crime that has any connection to Navy and Marine Corps personnel, regardless of rank or position.
Vivian's take
Twenty-plus years. Hundreds of episodes. A spinoff empire. NCIS is the cockroach of television — and Vivian means that as the highest compliment.
01The hook
Every few years, television declares the procedural dead — killed by prestige, by streaming, by the audience's supposed hunger for novelty. And every few years, NCIS is still there, solving Navy-adjacent crimes like it has since 2003, watched by millions of people the discourse forgot to consult. There is no more instructive show in American television. It is the gap between what the industry talks about and what the country watches, measured in decades.
The premise never needed reinvention: special agents, military crimes, a team with chemistry. Murder, espionage, terrorism, stolen submarines — the menu is vast, the format is fixed.
02The deep cut
What works: the machine. NCIS perfected the comfort-procedural — the case-of-the-week structure, the bullpen banter, the mentor dynamics — and then ran it with a consistency that borders on the athletic. The show understands its contract with the audience: competence, camaraderie, closure, every week. In an era of eight-episode seasons that take three years to return, there's something almost radical about a show that just shows up.
What doesn't: the formula is the formula. If you need serialized ambition, moral murk, or surprise, you're in the wrong precinct — the show's idea of a twist is a guest star. Two decades of cast turnover mean the chemistry gets rebuilt more often than the cases get reinvented. Who it's for: the loyal — the viewers who've been watching since before streaming, who want television to be a reliable appointment rather than an event. Judge it by its own meter or don't judge it at all.
03Cultural context
NCIS is the most important counterexample in modern TV. While the industry chased the prestige limited series and the binge-drop, this show kept proving that the mass audience never left the procedural — the industry just stopped making them well. Its spinoff empire is a case study in franchise management that the superhero factories could learn from: same DNA, new cities, no homework required. The 7.6 audience score, two decades in, isn't nostalgia. It's a constituency. Television's future is supposedly everything this show isn't — and yet here it is, outlasting the futures.
04The cast, then and now
The original bullpen is TV legend: Mark Harmon's Leroy Jethro Gibbs, the gut-instinct Marine with a boat in his basement and a rule for everything; Michael Weatherly's movie-quoting Tony DiNozzo; Cote de Pablo's lethal Ziva David; Pauley Perrette's goth lab tech Abby Sciuto; David McCallum's storytelling medical examiner Ducky Mallard. Two decades of departures rebuilt the team around survivors and successors. Today the desk is led by Gary Cole as Supervisory Special Agent Alden Parker, the ex-FBI man who took over the team in season 19, backed by Sean Murray's Timothy McGee — now the franchise's longest-serving original cast member — Wilmer Valderrama's Nick Torres, Katrina Law's Jessica Knight, Brian Dietzen's Dr. Jimmy Palmer (now chief medical examiner), and Diona Reasonover's forensic specialist Kasie Hines. Season 23 delivered the show's biggest cast shock in years: Director Leon Vance, played by Rocky Carroll since 2008, was killed off in episode 13, "All Good Things" — the series' 500th episode — though Carroll continues behind the camera as a director. And the headline for season 24, which premiered October 6, 2026: Michael Weatherly returns as Tony DiNozzo for a season-long arc, his first run on the flagship since 2016, picking up threads from the single-season Paramount+ spinoff NCIS: Tony & Ziva — now CEO of his own private security firm and warning the team that "something very bad" is happening.
05Twenty-four seasons and counting
NCIS began as a backdoor pilot inside two 2003 episodes of JAG, created by Donald P. Bellisario and Don McGill — and it never left. Season 23 (October 14, 2025 to May 12, 2026, twenty episodes) centered on Parker's obsessive pursuit of mob boss Carla Marino and his parallel investigation into his own mother's unsolved death, building to the Vance farewell that executive producer Steven D. Binder said was designed to send "shockwaves through the TV community and the fan base." CBS renewed the show for season 24 in January 2026 before season 23 had even finished airing. Around the flagship, the franchise keeps multiplying: NCIS: Sydney is in its third season, the prequel NCIS: Origins its second, and a new NCIS: New York is on the way with LL Cool J reprising Sam Hanna alongside Scott Caan. Previous entries — Los Angeles, New Orleans, Hawai'i — came and went; the machine endures.
06Reception by the numbers
Critics were never the point — the show's Metascore sits in the low 50s — but the audience never wavered. Season 23 averaged around 10 million viewers and ranked ninth for the 2025–26 season, numbers that prestige dramas would trade their cinematography for. The show's genius is demographic, not aesthetic: it serves the viewers streaming-era television keeps insisting don't exist — older, loyal, appointment-driven — and it serves them without condescension. Competence porn, found family, a case closed every week: NCIS understood the assignment in 2003 and simply never changed the answer.
Verdict: B. The most durable machine in television — not art, but craft at a scale nobody else sustains.