Austin Stowell stars as a young Leroy Jethro Gibbs in the new incarnation of “NCIS,” called “NCIS: Origins.”
Greg Gayne/CBS Entertainment/TNS
CBS’ “NCIS” seems to be the show that will not die. The original has spewed more colorful offspring than the Easter Bunny: “NCIS: New Orleans,” “Los Angeles,” “Hawai’i,” “Sydney.” And now “NCIS: Origins” premiers next Monday.
“Origins” is what it sounds like — a time-travel back to when Leroy Jethro Gibbs was a young special agent new to the Naval Investigative Service (precursor to NCIS) at California’s Camp Pendleton.
The show stars Austin Stowell as the fledgling Gibbs with the series’ original Gibbs, Mark Harmon, narrating and serving as executive producer.
Showrunners on the newcomer “Origins” are David J. North and Gina Lucita Monreal, both of whom worked on the original with Harmon. But Harmon left the show three years ago. Today he says, “I was always of the opinion that this show would carry on, no matter who left or who joined. So the fact that this show now comes out of the grass with these two (writers) which were, in my opinion, the best writer-creators that ever came through that footpath, there was just an opportunity there.”
The idea for the new spinoff wasn’t Harmon’s. It was his 36-year-old son Sean’s, who had acted in seven episodes of the original.
According to Sean, the idea hit like a bolt of lightning. “We were shooting episode 400 of ‘NCIS,’ the original show,” he recalls.
“When exploring this role, something my dad has always talked about, about the Gibbs character himself … as a guy who’s got something broken inside, a guy who at one point in his life is very much at risk of going down a much darker path.
“And what about this job (at NCIS) made that choice different? Kind of a more honorable path as opposed to one of oblivion. And that got me thinking because I got to portray him, obviously, as the bright and bushy-tailed young Marine who nothing horrible had happened to yet,” he says.
“And the man you all know from the mother ship series is essentially a guy who’s had 30 years to kind of come to terms with some serious trauma. But that guy in the middle, I think personally, is a very, very interesting character,” he says.
“It’s a guy with none of the answers and all of the trauma. And it kind of just got the wheels turning as to what could this be? And once you do the math and you see that it kind of puts you at the early ’90s which is a time period close to — most of my musical choices are from that (period). …
“It just started to take shape. And then, obviously, I put together a pitch and talked to my dad, and then I’ll never forget coming into the kitchen, and he was holding out a phone. And I was like, ‘Who’s on that?’ And he was like, ‘David North.’ I talked to David, and now here we are. And I just couldn’t be more excited and can’t wait to share … what we’ve been working on because we’re excited.”
