At one point, we thought that Mark Harmon‘s final episode of NCIS would also be the show’s. But he left four episodes into Season 19, and the CBS drama continues to thrive. In fact, it’s now in its 21st season, and the franchise—which also consists of Hawai’i, Sydney, and the already-ended Los Angeles and New Orleans—reaches its 1,000th episode with NCIS‘ April 15 installment. So it feels like, to us, a Season 22 pickup is inevitable because this show can just keep going.
“I’m hoping so as well,” series star Brian Dietzen (who has played Dr. Jimmy Palmer since Season 1) tells TV Insider. “I think that no one ever wants to count their chickens, but I think that the show has been doing really well. And why stop at 1,000? I feel like we’re halfway there. We want a clean, even 2,000. We’ll just keep it rolling.”
Hey, the series maintained its viewership even after moving to Monday nights at 9/8c for Season 19 (after previously airing Tuesdays at 8/7c).
“I was shocked. I thought that was an institution that would never move,” admits Dietzen. “But I’m really happy that since the move, our fans—I shouldn’t be surprised, but I still am—followed us and said, no, we’re going to keep watching this thing and make sure that this is still—I think it was this last year, we were the most viewed scripted show on television, still even opposite Monday Night Football. I think we all understand how blessed we are on that set.”
He also attributes the show’s success to the characters. “It’s a collaboration between our writers and our actors and how we’ve crafted these characters. Since Don Bellisario created this 21 years ago, the most important thing to him was, I need these characters to all look and sound different from one another,” he explains. “Because of that, our show has never been a show that’s ripped from the headlines. Really, the cases are ripped from the characters. So if you get to know who these characters are, you’ll know right away, oh, this is a case about kidnapping a young girl or something like that; Gibbs is going to have a certain way that he’s going to feel about that because we know his history, and so is Torres [Wilmer Valderrama], and this is going to hit them hard. This person lost their wife. Well, you know how Vance [Rocky Carroll] is going to react to that. You know how Jimmy Palmer’s going to react to that.”
Here’s hoping the team continues to grab their gear for seasons to come.
NCIS, Mondays, 9/8c, CBS
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
