‘NCIS’ Had to Make a Big Change to Not Annoy ‘CSI’ Creatives
Who knew that a JAG spinoff about investigating naval crimes would become one of the most popular and long-running shows on CBS? NCIS premiered in September 2003 and has been going strong ever since. However, the show has seen some big changes over the years, including several high-profile cast departures, as well as a subtle name change. Early on, NCIS had a slightly different title to avoid confusion with another popular show on the network.
‘NCIS’ was ‘pitched as ‘Law & Order’ in the Navy’
In the early 2000s, CBS decided to create a spinoff to the show, JAG, a legal drama about the navy’s judge advocates. The initial idea was to follow a format similar to NBC’s Law & Order. The first half of each episode would focus on the investigation of a crime. The second half would cover the legal resolution.
“The show was originally pitched as Law & Order in the Navy,” JAG director and NCIS executive producer Mark Horowitz told The Hollywood Reporter in a recent oral history of the show. “First, there’d be some crime, and the NCIS agents would investigate it — the cops of the Navy — and then the JAG people would come in and try the case.
The show’s creators played with that concept for a while. But eventually, they and the network decided to concentrate on the first half of the equation. They dropped the JAG element and developed a show focused on the officers working with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
‘NCIS’ was originally called ‘Navy NCIS’
Given that the show focused on agents with the NCIS, calling the show NCIS seemed like an obvious choice. But there was one slight problem. Another procedural with a similar name was already airing on CBS: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. (The name wasn’t the only thing the two shows had in common. CSI’s Greg Sanders inspired Pauley Perrette’s quirky Abby Sciuoto character, an insider told The Hollywood Reporter.)
To prevent confusion – and to avoid stepping on the toes of the people at CSI – the new show got an unwieldy title: Navy NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
“In that first year, understandably so, the CSI folks were not too happy about us bringing out a show called NCIS — a crime show with forensics,” JAG producer and NCIS co-creator Don McGill recalled. “So it was decided that, at least in that first year, to differentiate, it was called Navy NCIS, which is a little bit redundant. But it assuaged the concerns of the folks at CSI.”
With the Navy NCIS name, CBS also hoped to lure in JAG viewers interested in more military-focused stories, creator Don Bellisario told The New York Times in 2005. But he didn’t care for the name.
“I fought that idea all the way,” he said, adding that he “did not want the show to be just a stopgap for CBS. I foresaw CBS saying this is good for now and always looking for something better.”
Fortunately, the awkward name didn’t last long. By season 2, it had been shortened to NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Eventually, the show came to be known solely by the acronym NCIS.
NCIS is streaming on Paramount+ and Netflix.
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