‘NCIS’ Creator Reveals the Behind-the-Scenes Fight Fans Never Knew About

NCIS begins airing Season 23 soon, and fans love looking back on the early days of the show. What viewers may not realize is that before the first episode ever aired, there was a battle over what the name of the series would be.

Don McGill, co-creator and executive producer of NCIS, joined the Partners & Probies podcast to share some juicy nuggets.

NCIS was developed as a spinoff of the successful television series JAG. One primary concept that McGill and fellow creator Don Bellisario tossed around would have featured a successful interrogator who worked on hunting and breaking international terrorists.

Ultimately, they decided that the timing for a series like that wasn’t right, given how recent the September 11 tragedy had been as they developed the show.

After that, they swerved to focus on the investigative component of the naval justice system. Their focus would be to dig into what happens with the cases before they got to the courtroom, like JAG.

As they moved forward, they anticipated there would be some confusion or questions regarding how similar NCIS was as a show name compared to CSI.

Both shows aired at the same time for several years, and both were CBS series. It didn’t take long for fans to mix the two shows up, and the NCIS writers even slipped in some comical digs at CSI early in the series.

McGill said that when NCIS began, “the CSI folks were really p*****.”

He revealed that as they were developing NCIS, someone with CSI “called CBS and said, you can’t call that show NCIS.”

“There’s a whole fight” over it, McGill said. Because of the pushback from CSI, fans may remember that the very first season of NCIS technically was titled Navy NCIS.

The following season, the series was officially Navy Criminal Investigative Service. Once the show was an established hit, it shifted to NCIS and stayed that way.

NCIS fans who listened to the podcast got a kick out of McGill’s stories.

“Ooohhh… I knew there was trouble about naming it NCIS, but didn’t know it was that big of a deal. But here I am, a big fan of both franchises,” one fan wrote.

Several fans on social media remember the early days of NCIS when the network slightly altered the name.

The decisions made early on as NCIS was developed set the stage for a very successful, long-lasting show that fans still adore. In the early days, naming the show NCIS may have caused a bit of trouble for the show’s creators, but that seems to be water under the bridge now.