Future NCIS Spinoffs Need to Go Back to Their Roots, and It’s Actually Not NCIS
There’s yet so much more to explore after Gibbs’ entire lifetime.
The NCIS franchise is seemingly heading into a whole new era as it’s about to welcome a time-traveling spinoff to its collection. Set to get a release date sometime later this year, NCIS: Origins will quite literally come back to its origins taking viewers back in time and bringing them into the 1990s when young Leroy Jethro Gibbs was starting his long way as an NCIS Special Agent.
However, even with the franchise’s desire to explore its original characters’ past life before the series picked their storylines up, the NCIS universe now isn’t even close to its real roots, and exploring them as well may come as a good idea for other future spinoffs.
Whether it sounds too complicated or not, the truth is that NCIS: Origins is set to arrive as part of NCIS, but the latter actually originated from another popular show. The long-standing police procedural drama’s path was paved years before it aired on TV by CBS legal drama series JAG, launched in 1995 and eventually canceled in 2005.
The show followed pretty much the same pattern as NCIS afterwards, though with a difference being that officers trained as lawyers were the leads instead of special agents. Having eventually transformed into a huge franchise with the original show and several more spinoffs to continue their run, NCIS actually owes its existence and immense success to JAG that had launched the former as its spinoff.
Should NCIS’ brand new spinoff have a positive response from the viewers, the franchise could potentially consider more time-traveling notions for future shows, especially since JAG has always been a part of the universe and some of the storylines remain unfinished almost twenty years after the show ended.
Back in the day, NCIS already made an attempt to link JAG to its spinoff NCIS: Los Angeles by bringing back JAG’s Harmon Rabb Jr. and Sarah "Mac" MacKenzie, though their appearance eventually left even more unanswered questions than ever before.
A potential spinoff based on JAG is thus nothing but a profit for NCIS, as the latter may end up getting more viewers that back in the day enjoyed the original show while also letting the series wrap all of its stories up, especially given that NCIS: Los Angeles failed to do so in regards to one of them.