COMMENTARY
Jeff Simon: On ‘NCIS,’ it’s the characters that matter
The first time I saw “NCIS” all fat and sassy atop a Nielsen Top 10 list, I did a double take— huh? Tuesday night’s military cop show? The highest rated show on TV?
It doesn’t get there often but so help me it’s happened.
But then there’s no accounting for popularity and if there was ever a reason for the gods to give us television and TV ratings services, it’s merely to prove that.
Just as the most popular kids in high school so often grow up to be affectless, thoroughly dispirited adults (adolescence was their triumph; everything after was bewilderment), the most popular TV shows are so often those we can’t wait to forget 10 years later.
The other side of the same token, of course, is the large number of classic TV shows that always sputtered and struggled in the numbers game (Sid Caesar, most prominently).
In one of its more creative wrinkles this year, the new edition of the dreaded “Big Brother” has arranged its incarcerated cast into high school stereotypes: brains, athletes, popular types and offbeat sorts. From episode one on, you knew that the popular ones didn’t stand a chance.
In Brooks and Marsh’s “The Complete Directory of Prime- Time Network and Cable TV Shows 1946-Present,” I looked up the “Top Rated Programs by Season” and found such No. 1’s of the past as “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” (1951-52, “American Idol” anyone?), “The $64,000 Question,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” “Laverne and Shirley,” “Dallas,” “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and “Survivor.”
You could, I suppose, make an argument that for what they are, “Marcus Welby,” “Dallas” and “Survivor” are actually good TV, but you’d probably have to argue yourself into an intellectual pretzel to do it. In no time at all, they turn into nostalgia for which one’s respect is minimal.
For the rest, let’s just say quality isn’t much of an issue.
Please ignore all those CBS promos that call “NCIS” “hot,” as if it were meant for Paris Hilton.
“NCIS” is an extremely likable television show for one reason and one reason alone—a cast that has turned into a machine that meshes perfectly. Originally a spin-off from “JAG,” it has proven to be much more popular.
They don’t give Mark Harmon much to say in each episode. Mostly, he’s required to be a stoic male model, gray-haired division, with a few mild snarls, a couple of brisk movements and a lot of recurring meaningful stares into the distance. Most of the lines are given to the real actors—Michael Weatherly, Cote de Pablo, David McCallum, Sean Murray and Pauley Perrette. All of them are playing types—people who can be completely described in 10 words or less.
Weatherly is the movie-quoting horndog. De Pablo is the hot-bodied former Israeli assassin. McCallum is the endearing old pedant, Murray is the sweet-natured computer geek and Perrette is the adorable Goth chick and lab genius.
To be thoroughly honest, Perrette was the sole reason I tuned into the show in the first place and kept tuning in. I first saw her in a tiny role on the short-lived Fox show “John Doe” and thought the muslin-voiced actress was the most lovable and distinctive young TV ingenue to come along in ages. That, of course, was about 10 years ago.
Her stereotypical role calls for her to be the smiling, irresistible young kook, a young woman guaranteed to bring out the warm maternalism and paternalism in everyone over 40.
The trouble, of course, is that every passing year for Perrette is like every passing year for a “Harry Potter” kid—a further impediment to her career. Watching Perrette, now 40, in pigtails doing her bright-eyed and bushy-tailed number in schoolgirl kilt and knee socks is a wee bit disconcerting, but she’s still so good at it that I don’t mind.
Everyone else, especially McCallum, is beautifully cast, with the exception of Weatherly, who supposedly once dated Jessica Alba. To me, he sometimes seems like the sort of actor whose name was changed to Rock and Tab in the 1950s, but the young audience for the show has no trouble accepting him as the nattering horndog (a WASP version of the Tony Curtis role, if you will).
What will certainly be one of the worst TV ideas of the upcoming fall season is that they’re going to ignore how crucial the cast is for “NCIS” and try to make a franchise out of it. They’re going to put a spinoff in Los Angeles, starring Chris O’Donnell and LL Cool J.
In other words, they’re going to pretend that “NCIS” is the same sort of series as a “Law& Order” series or a “CSI” series, where the premise is what matters and not the cast, which is considered infinitely replaceable (Dick Wolf, in his time, has hired at least half the actors in New York on some “Law&Order” show or other).
As errant ideas go, that one is a beauty. It couldn’t possibly be more wrong-headed and if you saw the “NCIS” episode that served as a pilot for it, you know exactly how unpromising it is.
But, hey, they’re going to do it anyway because series franchises are where the money is.
Chris O’Donnell? The star of a TV series?
A small suggestion then: if they’re going to be thinking “spinoff,” why not try to find something plausible that Perrette can do in her adulthood in the center of her own show?
I have no idea what her numbers would be. All I know is that’s a show TV needs.
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