NCIS: Tony & Ziva builds on more than 10 seasons of relationship history between one of television’s most beloved and iconic duos, but even if you weren’t there for that rollercoaster ride, don’t discount the latest spinoff of the long-running CBS procedural.
Fortunately, unlike so many spinoffs and sequels crowding the airwaves currently, this one has no prior required viewing.
Whether you’ve never seen an episode of NCIS or you’re tuning back in after a few years off now that your favorite couple is back on-screen, the start of the series will get you up to speed. And if you’ve never missed an episode of the flagship show, then the early minutes of the episode will give you a chance to reminisce on nearly two decades of Tony and Ziva.
“The first three minutes of Episode 1 should hopefully be like a trailer that completely catches you up if you’ve never seen NCIS, even if you don’t know who Tony and Ziva are,” promises showrunner John McNamara. “Hopefully it gets you from kind of a dead start to a slow jog to a sprint, and then the episode starts.”
After that, it’s off to the races in this 10-episode first season following Tony and Ziva’s international exploits. Three episodes were released September 4, meaning there are seven more weeks of story unfolding on Paramount+ with new episodes arriving on Thursdays.
But make no mistake: Just because you don’t need to know the whole backstory doesn’t mean there isn’t one. There is, and it’s very precious to both NCIS fans and the stars who portray this long-beloved couple.
McNamara, a newcomer to the NCIS franchise himself, says he got a taste of just how much this duo means to audiences a few months ago when Paramount released a trailer for Tony & Ziva in May, racking up a record-breaking 93M views in just seven days.
“I’m so glad I didn’t know [how popular they were] until now. If I’d known that, like a year ago, I might have just never left my room,” he laughs.
But, while he might not have known how well received the series’ promo would be with NCIS fans, he always knew that Tony and Ziva’s shared history was a sacred one. McNamara credits his conversations with Weatherly, whom he has been friends with for decades, and de Pablo for shepherding his understanding of these characters and their storied relationship.
“The characters were gonna be the guide. They would be the thing that the audience would come for…their chemistry was the absolute key,” McNamara said of his approach to this spinoff. “I think what’s really smart is that each of the episodes [in Tony & Ziva] moves the relationship forward, or blows it up, [or] moves it backwards, but each of them is really very relationship centric.”
NCIS: Tony & Ziva picks up years after the last time NCIS audiences saw either Tony or Ziva, featuring fan favorites Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo reprising the popular characters first introduced in the early seasons of NCIS. In Tony & Ziva, it’s been years since Ziva’s supposed death, when Tony left the NCIS team to go raise their daughter Tali only to find out years later that Ziva was actually alive. Since then, Tony and Ziva have been raising Tali together in Paris. That is, until they have to go on the run across Europe after Tony’s security company is attacked.
“It was an easy yes. We had been manifesting it for years,” de Pablo said of returning to the franchise for this spinoff.
In fact, this type of storytelling, which removes Tony and Ziva from the hamster wheel of the crime procedural, is something that she and Weatherly have long discussed as a way to continue their story. De Pablo abruptly left the flagship series in 2013 after starring in eight of the shows then-10 seasons. Weatherly exited in 2016 after 13 seasons.
Both have said they thought that, aside from perhaps a few appearances here and there, their time as Tony and Ziva was largely over. But, they always had hopes for more.
“Once Cote left the show, and then I subsequently left the show, we kept talking like, ‘What would it look like if we were to keep doing it?’” Weatherly recalls. “It’s one of these things that was conjured, as opposed to couched by an executive class that was like, ‘How can we make more of the four letter show?’ It’s a much more emotional thing for both Cote and I.”
De Pablo adds that, from those early conversations, “we knew that we wanted to take it outside of the procedural world.”
“[It’s] a fantastic structure, and a lot of people love it, but it kind of limited our ability to explore the relationship the way we wanted it, and so we wanted to create a scenario where we could have to rely on each other to explore the depth of that relationship and everything that entails,” she continued.
Hardcore Tiva fans will certainly be delighted to see these two share the screen together for the first time in about six years. While Paramount is unabashedly trying to attract new audiences with Tony & Ziva, the creative team has also set out to make sure that the avid fanbase they already have doesn’t feel abandoned.
“There are so many payoffs,” Weatherly somewhat cryptically teases.
While viewers will need to tune in to find out exactly what those payoffs might be, there’s an early moment that illustrates the vibe of this new series quite well.
In the first episode, there’s a cheeky nod to the flagship NCIS series when Tony alerts Ziva to danger via the iconic acronym, which in this series doesn’t stand for Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Instead, it stands for No Country Is Safe, part of a private code shared between the two.
McNamara says he got the idea while fiddling with some Scrabble letters, trying to figure out what else the four-letter acronym could stand for. It’s not only an homage to the characters’ origins, it’s also a subtle signal to NCIS fans, saying: This show should feel familiar. But, it’s also different.
De Pablo and Weatherly recognize that a lot has changed, and audiences certainly have questions about Tony and Ziva that they’d like to see answered throughout the series. Among them:
“Who are these people without the agency? How do they rely on each other?” rattled off de Pablo. “How are they as parents? Can they make it work? Will they make it work? How are they communicating today? What have they gone through? Do you think they’ve ever tried getting back together? Do you think it ever worked?”
She continued: “They’ve also grown up. They’ve become parents, and they are trying to figure things out, and they still have that magic chemistry thing, and it gets them into trouble — or does it?”
McNamara assures that he’s setting out to answer many of these questions throughout the course of this series. Amid the unfolding espionage tale, Tony & Ziva jumps into the past many times to fill in some of the gaps in the relationship that didn’t occur on screen and provide even more ripe emotional fodder to keep audiences on the edge of their seats as they are catapulted through this story.
It was a balancing act, Weatherly explains, to ensure “that we paid homage to all of the notes that were played in the prior incarnations of these characters, and yet, here were these characters in an entirely new circumstance with a child and new responsibilities.”
Unlike its procedural predecessors, NCIS: Tony & Ziva will only be airing through October. Its breezy 10-episode first season is yet another reason why new audiences may find this series an easy entry into the franchise, unlike the 20-plus-episode seasons of its broadcast siblings.
On the other hand, 10 episodes isn’t very much time to let a story unfold, leaving plenty on the table for McNamara, Weatherly and de Pablo to continue exploring in potential future seasons. There is, of course, no guarantees about the future of the series quite yet, but rest assured the trio is already concocting some ideas for Season 2.
“I don’t want to curse myself or or count my chickens before they hatch, but we’re kicking around a couple ideas I’ve had — very, very vague, more areas [to explore] than plot,” McNamara said. “I think we’ve got a lot of unresolved conflict that we can look at mining.”
