Nobody ever went broke making TV shows about heinous crimes being solved in 39 minutes, plus commercials. For proof, we turn to Donald Bellisario and Don McGill’s NCIS franchise.
Since 2003, the JAG spinoff has kept audiences company with its hard-hitting devotion to justice, comradery, and American Pickers crossover episodes. Like any self-respecting crime procedural, NCIS has always exhibited an enthusiastic willingness to pin a colon to the end of its title and add the name of a city, offering a new batch of TV actors a chance to make syndication residuals. How many times has this happened? The answer is as complicated as you want it to be.
The complicated head count of NCIS shows
The straightforward answer is five: NCIS, which debuted in 2003, NCIS: Los Angeles, which ran from 2009 to 2023, NCIS: New Orleans, which started in 2014 and ran until 2021, NCIS: Hawai’i, which tagged in in 2021 and is still on the air, and NCIS: Sidney – the forthcoming Australia-based series premiering in 2023. Additionally, there’s NCIS: Red – the spinoff of a spinoff that got the backdoor pilot treatment in 2014 during a two-part story on NCIS: Los Angeles. The series was meant to introduce audiences to a team of traveling forensics experts solving crimes in a mobile crime lab. CBS decided against taking the concept to series.
So, there have been five NCIS shows. Six, if you count JAG, and you should. It’s the series where the characters from NCIS first showed up, and they’ve done tons of crossovers in the years that followed. So six. Six and a half, if you count NCIS: Red.
Or maybe there are more. In 2011 and 2012, NCIS: Los Angeles crossed over with the 2010 CBS reboot of Hawaii Five-0. That makes things extra complicated, since Hawaii Five-0 has, itself, crossed over with the 2016 reboot of MacGyver and the 2018 reboot of Magnum P.I. So if you see all of those shows as an extension of the NCIS shared universe, the answer is nine. Nine and a half if you count NCIS: Red.
But wait, it gets better
And here’s where it gets really difficult to parse: In 2014, an episode of the CBS series Scorpion featured a cameo appearance by Linda Hunt, playing her NCIS: Los Angeles character Hetty Lange. Scorpion is, itself, based on the real life of IT businessman Walter O’Brien. Additionally, Mike Wolfe — the host of the History Channel’s reality series American Pickers — appeared on an episode of NCIS during season 15. If NCIS is tied to Scorpion and American Pickers, and Scorpion and American Pickers are tied to real life, that makes the real world — and, by extension, every piece of art and media ever created therein — an NCIS tie-in. Tommy Westphall’s got nothing on us, we’re part of a bigger Mark Harmon-backed cinematic universe than the St. Elsewhere writers’ room could have even imagined.
All of which is to say – congratulations, you’re an NCIS character. Call your dad, he’s going to be more excited than you’d think.
