What To Know
- NCIS became a major ratings hit in Season 4.
- Former executive producer Mark Horowitz explains how syndication played a major role.
NCIS is going strong 23 years in. It survived the exit of its lead (Mark Harmon, who continues to serve as an executive producer). It’s going into Season 24 this fall. But it wasn’t always a given that the series would continue. There was, however, a turning point that former executive producer Mark Horowitz recalled during the latest NCIS: Partners & Probies podcast with Brian Dietzen (Dr. Jimmy Palmer) and Diona Reasonover (Kasie Hines).
Dietzen recalled Don Bellisario telling the cast of the Season 2, then Season 3 pickups and after the latter, saying, “Here’s to a Season 3 and a 4 and a 5 and a 6,” and Harmon’s eyes going wide, “like, ‘How can you be so certain?’ We’re all happy to be on a on a top what, 20 show at the time, something like that. but yeah, he really saw into the future,” he said.
Horowitz explained that given his past successes, Bellisario “was a long-term thinker. It’s very, very rare and I give CBS equal credit in as much as that show went on Tuesdays at 8:00 and it just stayed right where it was. And they didn’t fuss with it. They didn’t move it around. They didn’t make a lot of extraneous changes. They just let it be, let it find itself because it takes time for a show to find itself, and let it find its audience. And what was it really between Season 3 and 4, the beginning of Season 4 is when things really kind of took off.”
When Dietzen then asked why that was, that NCIS started being a ratings success at that point, Horowitz agreed that syndication played a major role — as it had for JAG, from which the series is a spinoff. (Two backdoor pilot episodes aired on JAG before NCIS was picked up to series.)
As Dietzen explained, “When a show back in the day — this doesn’t happen so much anymore — hit a certain number, say 80 episodes, 100 episodes, a cable company or an entertainment conglomerate can buy all the rights to those episodes and play them on repeat on your favorite channel, say USA or TNT, something like that.” That happened with NCIS.
“JAG, between I want to say between Seasons 3 and 4, started playing on I want to say USA Network, and they started running them all day long. And at first blush, I would think, doesn’t just this just dilute the audience? I mean, aren’t they just going to get sick of everything?” Horowitz admitted. “But that’s not the way it works. They’re two separate audiences. And so the same thing happened on NCIS.”
He continued, “People would start watching these marathons. They hadn’t seen the show on network. They’re cable watchers. They could watch 10 episodes in a row. And now by the end of the summer, they’ve caught up. And they don’t feel like they’re out of the loop. They could go, ‘Gee, you know, Tuesday nights at 8:00, I could watch the latest version of this.’ And suddenly, we had this whole influx of new viewers watching. That was a miracle. That was just a wonderful way to celebrate the show, to have the show be seen by so many people.”
When and how did you start watching NCIS? Let us know in the comments section below.
NCIS, Season 24, Fall 2026, Tuesdays, 8/7c, CBS