NCIS: Sydney Boss Previews Aussie Offshoot, ‘Easter Egg’ Nods to Other NCIS Shows (Exclusive)
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NCIS: Sydney will feel very familiar to fans of CBS’ well-watched franchise, while also being uniquely Australian, showrunner Morgan O’Neill tells TVLine in the exclusive Q&A below.
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The premise for NCIS: Sydney: As international tensions rise in the Indo-Pacific, a brilliant and eclectic team of U.S. NCIS Agents and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) are grafted into a multi-national task force, to keep naval crimes in check in the most contested patch of ocean on the planet.
The two teams are respectively led by NCIS Special Agent Michelle Mackey, played by Legends of Tomorrow vet Olivia Swann, and her 2IC AFP counterpart, Sergeant Jim “JD” Dempsey, played by Todd Lasance (Spartacus: War of the Damned).
The cast also includes Sean Sagar (Fate: The Winx Saga) as NCIS Special Agent DeShawn Jackson, Tuuli Narkle (Bad Behaviour) as AFP Liaison Officer Constable Evie Cooper, Mavournee Hazel (Neighbours) as AFP Forensic Scientist Bluebird “Blue” Gleeson, and William McInnes (Blue Heelers) as AFP Forensic Pathologist Dr. Roy Penrose.
The first international NCIS offshoot’s eight-episode season will premiere on CBS on Tuesday, Nov. 14 at 8/7c, and also be available live and on demand that night for Paramount+ with Showtime subscribers. (“Regular” Paramount+ Essential subscribers can stream each episode the day after it airs.)
Check out the exclusive key art poster above (click to zoom), then read on to see what series boss Morgan O’Neill has to say about the NCIS franchise’s trip to the land Down Under….
TVLINE | What was the genesis of NCIS: Sydney? Was CBS looking for an NCIS set on another continent, or was it, “We need a show for Paramount+ Australia”?
MORGAN O’NEILL | I think it was more the former, although the latter is probably a good upside for it, too. My understanding is that CBS Studios was looking to expand the franchise beyond [the northern] hemisphere. Since the show revolves around naval crimes, naturally they looked at “the world’s largest island,” and then they pitched the idea to Bev McGarvey who runs Paramount+ Australia. She’s a massive fan of the franchise, so she said, “Let me take it to Endemol Shine Australia (ESA).” They then came to me and said, “We have this incredible opportunity to expand one of the world’s biggest franchises into Australia. How the hell would you do it?” I got together with the head of scripted at ESA and worked up what this show might look like and pitched it back to Paramount+ and to CBS Studios. They flipped for it at lightning speed, which almost never happens in our industry.
TVLINE | Is there anything that a U.S. viewer should know before watching this, with regards to what’s different about law enforcement in Australia?
The first and most obvious difference is that while NCIS exists in Australia in real life, they don’t have the same kind of jurisdictional authority as they would in the U.S., because they’re in a foreign country. So when NCIS works in Australia they work in conjunction with our highest law enforcement agencies — in particular the Australian Federal Police, which are our equivalent of the FBI. From the perspective of our show, what’s going to be very, very different is that it’s effectively the first “blended family” where NCIS has to form a team with the Australian Federal Police and operate in conjunction with them.
It’s Australians and Americans working not always in concert, but certainly together, and working through cultural differences, working through the clashes that would naturally exist when you bring two disparate organizations together. But ultimately they find that there is this core DNA that they share between the two organizations that actually bonds them into a team really quickly, but with unexpected results.
TVLINE | So, each case will need to involve some sort of U.S. serviceman…?
Absolutely. The basic premise that NCIS has to find a connection, a nexus back to the U.S. Navy, will continue, but what’s interesting in Australia is that it’s not just the Navy. If there is something that happens in Australia in the Army or the Air Force or the Coast Guard that pertains to the U.S., NCIS does the investigations. So, in a funny way they actually have a bigger remit than they do in the U.S. because they’re looking after the four other arms of the Armed Forces.
TVLINE | What are some fun character dynamics to watch for?
Well, No. 1 on the call sheet, the person who gets to kind of call the shots out here, is [NCIS Special Agent] Michelle Mackey (played by Olivia Swann). She’s a former Marine captain/chopper pilot and somewhat of a maverick, so she’s kind of a problem child who’s been handed around NCIS for a little while as they figure out how to handle her. She drops into Australia where we are, in and of ourselves — how should I put it nicely for my fellow countrymen? — a bit “antiauthoritarian.” So sparks fly naturally, which is great.
Then there’s a core group of characters, which in some ways will feel familiar to an NCIS audience, because they know that in the world of the show there are investigators and forensic pathologists and forensic scientists involved. They’ll look at the show and see a familiar architecture to it, but three-quarters of them are Australians and that makes for a very, very different experience. A lot of the things that Americans take for granted about the world will be put up into relief here a bit, and interrogated, but ultimately what’s fascinating about these characters and the first season of this show is that it doesn’t actually take very long to realize that they’re kind of cut from the same cloth.
TVLINE | Did you try to cast the Australian side of the cast with 100% percent Australians? How did that net out?
It’s interesting — the show is an entirely Australian show. Its cast, it’s crewed, it’s written by, it’s produced by, and it’s commissioned by Australians. All of the Australian characters are Australians, and that’s 95% of the cast including guest cast. But when you work on a show that’s as big as NCIS, which is is 200 territories, in 60 different languages, with trillions of hours of this show watched, the great relief from a showrunner’s point of view is that I don’t really have to go out and find “stars.” The show is already the star; I just get to cast the greatest actors on the planet! So we were able to cast really wide, really broadly, to find the best actors to slide into these pretty unique roles. And we were able to find a couple of actors out of the UK, as it would happen, who are just remarkable, in Olivia Swann and Sean Sagar.
TVLINE | I know Olivia from Legends of Tomorrow, and she’s great.
She’s incredible, and I had sort of been following both her and Sean. I’m a huge fan of [director] Guy Ritchie and Sean is one of Guy Ritchie’s favorite actors to work with.
I’ve worked on a lot of shows and I’m a huge believer in the idea that whatever the vibe is amongst the humans that make the show somehow translates to the screen. And in this case, as we wrapped production on Season 1, even though some actors when they wrap you never see them again, they kept coming back to set. In fact, Olivia wrapped up on the very last day of shooting, but Todd Lasance, who is her No. 2, made a point to be there. It’s a real vibe, and we’re really excited to see what the rest of the world thinks.
TVLINE | Will there be nods to any other NCIS shows along the way? “I once met Leroy Jethro Gibbs at a conference…” or something?
Look, there are a couple of little Easter eggs there. I won’t spoil them, but they’re definitely there. One of the things that I think audiences love about this show is the fact that it feels like a universe, not individual shows. And while they each have their own DNA, I think that’s what was really clever about the way CBS Studios developed this franchise is they didn’t go out to make the same show twice. If you look at the original show, the mothership, it’s very different from L.A.…
TVLINE | Oh, NCIS: LA was chasing stolen nuclear materials, like, every other week!
Correct. Each show gets a different tonality, a different vibe, a different pace, a different rhythm, a different color palette, a different sensibility. I feel like what CBS Studios did really cleverly was they realized that they needed to expand the audience and to expand the universe, but not just replicate it. So when they came to us, I kind of sat down and watched about 950 episodes of NCIS [programs] in the space of a few weeks to get myself up to speed — I feel like I have a PhD in NCIS! — and what I realized was that they were looking to capture the authenticity of a place. So I went back to [CBS Studios chief] David Stapf and his crew and said, “In order for this to be successful, I think it really has to capture that authentic rhythm, that authentic cultural sensibility of Australia — the colors, the flavor. We should lean into it.” And they said, “That’s music to our ears. Go for it.”
TVLINE | I was going to ask: After a person gets done watching this first season — and if they like me have yet to pull the trigger on an Australian vacation — will they kind of feel like they’ve been to Australia?
I hope so, I really do. You’ll certainly feel like you’ve been Sydney. I’m actually kind of surprised in some ways that they haven’t come here and created a franchise sooner. As I said to you before, Australia is the world’s largest island and Sydney Harbor is the world’s largest harbor. And our naval base, which is called HMAS Kuttabul or Fleet Base East, is right in the middle of that harbor. Like, our entire East Coast Navy Base fleet is based in town, so you’ve got an almost indefatigable, inexhaustible supply of stories right in the middle of the world’s biggest harbor on the world’s biggest island. And then you throw in the geopolitical realities of the part of the world that we live in, in that the Indo-Pacific is kind of the hotspot for all sorts of geopolitical tensions right now. It’s the most hotly contested patch of ocean.
TVLINE | The trailer plays that up a lot.
I mean, that’s the situation. Pick up the New York Times and I dare you not to find an article about tensions between China and the Philippines, or contested maritime rights in the South China Sea. It’s an incredibly diverse and vibrant part of the world. Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation on the planet, is just to our north — friends of Australia obviously, but it’s diverse. You’ve got one of the world’s biggest shipping nations in Singapore [3,900 miles away]. You’ve got the world’s second biggest island, Papua New Guinea, right there. You’ve got all these islands dotted across the Pacific, which fall under our sphere of economic cooperation, in terms of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, and all of them are contested places at the moment. There are lots of forces vying for economic, military, social partnership.
The trailer mentions the AUKUS Agreement, a military alliance between Australia, the U.S. and the UK, which has only recently been signed. It’s a big deal and it’s literally there because we are in a really contested patch of the world right now. The show tries not to too political, obviously — that’s part of the appeal of it, I think — but the reality is we have basically an endless supply of stories pulled from the front page of the newspaper that seem to be really applicable.
TVLINE | What specific sites or locations were you excited to squeeze into the show?
When we started out, we looked at the Australian Navy base in the middle of the harbor, which is where all the American ships come into, and said, “Wow, it’d be fun to get on that, wouldn’t it? It’d be fun to be able to shoot on the actual operating Navy base.” So, we contacted the Australian Navy and said, “Look, we have this little show you might’ve heard of — NCIS? We’ll be doing a franchise here in Sydney, would you like to help out?” And believe it or not they said, “We’d love to, send us a letter with all the things you feel like you might need across the season.” I went, “Well, we need Seahawk helicopters, and we need access to your biggest ships, we’d like to get onboard your subs, we’d like to work and shoot on your Navy bases all around the country, we’d like to get some air assets….” And they came back and they were just incredibly supportive.
In the trailer, that Navy Seahawk helicopter flying at 50 feet above Sydney Harbor? That’s a real one. There’s no CG. We had to clear the harbor, we had an air exclusion zone, and we had the pilots from the Australian Navy flying up from their base down south and landing on a small aircraft carrier and taking off. It was an incredible thrill.
TVLINE | Were there any more “touristy” locales you filmed at?
When you film on Sydney Harbor you kind of spin the camera around and see the Harbor Bridge, you see the Opera House, you see this vast harbor….. We shot at Bondi Beach, which is Australia’s most famous beach. We shot in Kings Cross, which anyone who’s ever been a U.S. serviceman arriving in Sydney will know; it’s the red light district just up the hill from the base, so it’s seen its fair share of U.S. servicemen and women across the years, in all capacities.
One of the things that people think about when they think of Australia is the Outback. Obviously Sydney is not in the Outback, it’s a big urban center, but not too far away you drive up into the mountains and suddenly you’re in this pristine wilderness that’s very uniquely, quintessentially Australian. So, we find ourself up there.
TVLINE | And that lets you include a kangaroo and koala in the trailer!
It does!
TVLINE | Someone at CBS was like, “Yeah, we saw your first pass at the trailer, and there’s no kangaroo. You’ve gotta give them a kangaroo.”
It was a shameless plug for Australian wildlife, what can I say?
Want scoop on CBS’ NCIS: Sydney, or for any other TV show ? Email InsideLine@tvline.com, and your question may be answered via Matt’s Inside Line!
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