CBS ratings juggernaut NCIS is celebrating its 20th year on the air this month, and you know what that means: Gossip! Specifically, the incredibly successful boat-crimes show is the subject of a new oral history in The Hollywood Reporter this week, and while a lot of it is straight hagiography—NCIS produces warm feelings at its home network that are typically only associated with big, huge, stupid piles of money being generated for multiple decades at a time—the conversation does frequently veer into the show’s numerous high-profile departures. That includes those of stars Mark Harmon and Pauley Perrette, plus series creator/legendary TV producer Donald Bellisario, who everyone involved is careful to not outright say was fired because Harmon didn’t want to work with him anymore.
A lot of the juicier stuff in the oral history comes from series executive producer Charles Floyd Johnson, who’s been with the series since the beginning (and who notes, near the end, that he’s also maybe looking for an exit soon, after two decades of naval intrigue). Here, for instance, is Johnson talking about the split between Harmon—who everyone in the piece speaks of pretty warmly, characterizing him as a “leader”—and the “perfectionist” Bellisario, who became notorious for changing scripts on the day of shooting:
And so when we got to about year four, Harmon just felt like it was too hard. He never said to anybody, “Get rid of Don.” He just said, “This is too hard to work this way.” Eventually, the network went to Bellisario and said, “Maybe you should work from a distance from it and not be quite as involved in terms of the way you work.” And so Bellisario, by the fifth year, was gone.
(Bellisario contends that he’d “done enough on the show,” and that leaving was his decision.)
The oral history subjects are more circumspect about the departure of Perrette, who played the show’s most instantly recognizable character, perky Goth forensics expert Abby Scuito. But what’s there does confirm at least some of the stories surrounding Perrette’s departure back in 2018, including the fact that the inciting incident was her unhappiness over Harmon’s dog biting someone on the show’s set. “The dog kept coming with Harmon,” Johnson says, “And she felt it wasn’t safe for the show. By the end of that year, she just felt like it wasn’t working for her anymore, and it was time to move on.” (The history does not get into the stories that Harmon and Perrette refused to film together for their last several seasons on the show together, with each actor being scheduled to be on set on different days, and editing tricks used to make it look like they were in the room together.)
As for Harmon himself, who departed in the show’s 19th season, everybody is pretty overwhelmingly nice, pointing out that 18 years is a long time to do anything, and noting that he stayed on longer than he wanted to out of concern for his co-workers and crew. Johnson also touches briefly on the show’s tendency to get rid of female characters faster than male ones. (“Some fans complained that it was always women who went faster than the guys. But it did keep audiences’ attention.”) Oh, and they note some folks in the show’s fanbase—which nobody outright says is mostly older conservative people who love watching murders get solved on boats—really didn’t like that time they had Michelle Obama on. The piece then ends with representatives from both the studio and the network stating that the show “can go on forever,” which, in the context of an article at least partially about how NCIS chews through cast and creatives, is a nice, and not at all dystopian, note to go out on.
