Both Mark Harmon and Rocky Carroll, who play Gibbs and Vance respectively on NCIS, agree that the success of the CBS procedural is due in large part to it being not your typical procedural.
“You’ve got to have a thick skin to work here. This is a group who likes to have fun,” says Harmon, while Carroll credits the fact that the NCIS characters are three-dimensional, including their quirks and idiosyncrasies.
“You know the funny side to DiNozzo (Michael Weatherly), you know what he and McGee (Sean Murray) are like,” he said. “You don’t want anything bad to happen to them because the audience has become familiar with so many different sides to them that the audience has become familiar with them and that’s a good thing.”
True enough, NCIS fans and showrunners alike point to this humor in its ascent atop the ratings ladder. But that’s not all. Hard work also figures in the equation, as Harmon remembers a time when workdays on NCIS reached 19 grueling hours. Now they’ve come down to a more manageable 14-hour workdays.
As for Carroll, who also moonlights on the spin-off NCIS: Los Angeles, he says the shows are different because other procedurals tend to portray police officers in too “heroic” a light.
“You kind of forget that these are really people,” he says.
Tomorrow’s NCIS episode is Vance-centric, as his family is once again put into danger when an assassin from his past returns to threaten their safety, and the team works on helping Vance face his troubled past.
– Glenn Diaz, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Source: Movie Line, National Ledger
(Image courtesy of CBS)
Staff Writer, BuddyTV
