NCIS’ Brian Dietzen on Crafting a ‘Proper’ Farewell to Both Ducky and David McCallum: ‘The Team Is Rocked’
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“It’s wonderful to look back on David’s life of 90 years. The amount of life that he lived is pretty, pretty incredible.”
Listening to Brian Dietzen, who since Season 1 has played NCIS‘ Dr. Jimmy Palmer, reflect on the life and legacy of David McCallum, it becomes especially clear that he deserved to have a hand in crafting the episode that pays tribute to both his late castmate and Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard.
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Nearly five months after McCallum’s death, CBS’ NCIS this Monday at 9/8c will air “The Stories We Leave Behind,” which Dietzen co-wrote with executive producer Scott Williams. In that can’t-miss episode, as NCIS mourns Ducky, the agents find some comfort in working on one of his unfinished cases involving a woman whose father was dishonorably discharged from the Marines.
Here, Dietzen speaks with TVLine about honoring “not only the character of Ducky, but also David McCallum, in a proper way”….
TVLINE | When this episode came along, did the producers instinctively reach out to you, as a longtime scene partner of David’s, or did you step forward and volunteer your writing services?
BRIAN DIETZEN | Before David passed, we had that work stoppage with the WGA and SAG strikes, so I had said to Steven Binder and David North, our showrunners, “I don’t need to write this year,” because we only have 10 episodes. I didn’t want to insert myself. But then when David passed away, Scott Williams, my co-writer, volunteered to do this episode and he said to me, “I thought it was only right that you co-write with me.” And then everybody in the room said, “Yeah, that’s perfect. That’s what should happen.” And I said, “Absolutely, I’d be honored to.”
TVLINE | Who in the process comes up with the basic framework for an episode such as this?
Scott and I talked about it, and decided we still wanted it to be an NCIS show — it wasn’t going to be entirely a clip show of “Ducky’s Greatest Hits.” We wanted to have a case, and thought we should come up with a case that’s thematically linked in some way to losing a valued and loved team member. So we came up with this concept of how, when we’re done with with life, the stories that we leave behind are what’s important. What’s important is what’s left to our loved ones.
TVLINE | The episode opens by jumping back a bit in time to show Jimmy actually finding Ducky, passed away, when you could have instead picked up with the phone call at the end of the season premiere. What was important to you about including that particular moment?
I think everyone knows that we want to honor not only the character of Ducky, but also David McCallum, in a proper way, and what was important about it was showing that this is a family — how you come in and take care of your own, how you are there for your loved ones. This is a part of Jimmy’s daily existence, going into Ducky’s house and picking him up to bring him to work, dropping off some coffee, maybe just checking in on him as you do with with a family member. I thought that it was really important to show how hard this team is hit, how hard they’re rocked by this loss. And the person that certainly was closest to him was Jimmy.
TVLINE | It would make sense that this episode focuses a bit more on Jimmy, a bit more on McGee, because they’ve been around for the whole stretch. Is that how it ended up panning out, that their reactions got a little more emphasis than others?
Since Jimmy worked so closely with Ducky, for a couple decades, it made sense that a lot of the story would be retold through his eyes and his memories. And certainly, McGee had been there with him as well, but what was really important to Scott and I, and to the whole crew, was that we honor Ducky’s relationship with the larger team, not meaning just the current team of Parker and Knight and Torres and McGee and Kasie, but also the teams that came before. We wanted to make sure that some of these memories, and some of these loved ones and family members from past iterations of the NCIS team, were represented, and that his relationship with with those characters was honored as well.
TVLINE | Along those lines, what are you at liberty to say about how you navigated that sticky wicket of giving viewers a sense of how, say, Gibbs takes this news?
That’s one of those things where every idea under the sun was thrown at us, from the network on down. “Can we get every person that’s ever been in the history of NCIS, and all of its sister shows, back together for one scene where everyone’s sitting together?” Logistically, those things aren’t really a possibility, unfortunately, so we tried to have shout-outs to these other field offices around the country, throughout the show, and also show tokens of admiration and honor that are coming from past team members — as well through flashback scenes, or even gifts that they’re sending, tokens of love.
TVLINE | One thing that always fascinates me, technically, about episodes like this is: Whose job is it to cherry-pick incredibly perfect archival sound bites and flashback moments?
That’s us. That’s that’s me sitting here with a Paramount+ account, man, watching NCIS until my eyes bleed. Yeah, Scott and I watched a ton, and a few of our writers, writer’ assistants and specifically [producer] Justin [Kilmer] watched a lot, as well. We knew, “OK, we want this sort of scene,” “We want that sort of scene.” And there’s almost a bit of a reverse engineering where you go, “I remember this really great thing that we did in the [Season 10] episode ‘Detour,’ where we’re running through the forest and it’s snowing and we’re arguing over who’s should have the gun and who shouldn’t,” and I’m like, “I want to add that in there somewhere, but I’m not sure where,” so you craft the scene so that it works within the scene.
TVLINE | If you don’t mind me asking, when had you last spoken to David?
I spoke to him on his birthday, which was on Tuesday [Sept. 19], and then he passed away that Monday, on the 25th. So, yeah, it was it was a couple of days before. That was his 90th birthday, a few days before he passed away. We got to speak, we got to chat. He was coherent and all that…. I’m really, really glad that I got to speak to him one last time. It was really wonderful.
TVLINE | How would you say that David’s passing recontextualized the otherwise long-awaited return to work for everyone, after the strikes?
It was very interesting, because, yeah, it puts a lot of things in perspective, obviously. I mean, we all know that we’re blessed to be on the show, man. You certainly know that, you’ve been covering the show for a long time. It’s a wonderful group of people, and it’s not lost on us at all how blessed we are to have the jobs that we do, to tell the stories that we do. So, I think every single one of us was really champing at the bit to get back to work.
Then when David passed away…. I was walking on picket lines and there were a lot of people I would see, that I didn’t even know, that would come up and extend their condolences, just because he had meant a lot to them and I was the closest thing to a “family member” or something. It’s not like his kids, or his wife, are walking out there, so they’d come up and say, “I’m so sorry, I know you guys are really tight.” That was wonderful to see and hear. And I’ll tell you what, when shooting this episode, there were a lot of David McCallum stories flying left and right, a lot of fun stuff that’s happened over the course of 20 years. A lot of it we were fortunate enough to capture in the script and show some memories. But there were some [stories] that we were like, “That’s just for us. That’s just for our people that are making the show, and that stays in the family.” It was cool to explore both.
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