These Two NCIS Stars Worked Together for Much Longer Than You Can Imagine

NCIS has passed years featuring a powerful duo of its most significant characters Leroy Jethro Gibbs and Leon Vance, portrayed by Mark Harmon and Rocky Carroll respectively, but both actors had another major project to work on together long before NCIS came in their way.

Both starred in the 1994 CBS medical drama Chicago Hope that surely didn’t have as much luck as NCIS and was canceled after 6 seasons. Still, the series came as a kind of prophecy for Mark Harmon’s future big role that he wouldn’t have handled without Chicago Hope.

What Is Chicago Hope About?

Set in a fictional private hospital in Chicago, the show follows its doctors’ professional and personal lives as they have to deal with complicated and often very melodramatic cases on a daily basis, while still trying to figure out how to resolve their own issues outside of the hospital walls. In the series, Mark Harmon portrays Dr. Jack McNeil, an orthopedic surgeon, while Rocky Carroll is emergency room physician Dr. Keith Wilkes.

Those who at some point got to watch both NCIS and Chicago Hope would surely claim that the latter had been preparing Harmon and Carroll for their moment of fame in NCIS, but applying different methods for both of them.

Harmon’s role in Chicago Hope came as just an earlier version of his Leroy Jethro Gibbs in the police procedural giant as the actor’s McNeil is often seen taking everything under his control and handling some difficult situations as he guides other doctors in their further actions.

In his turn, Carroll’s role didn’t really foresee his future as NCIS Director, though his take in NCIS became a much more serious matter that could be considered a different version of Wilkes who got a personal growth over the course of time.

Though Mark Harmon isn’t a part of the long-standing franchise anymore as season 19 featured his character’s departure from the team to eventually end up spending his retirement in Alaska, Gibbs’s story is still set to be back to the screens in the NCIS spinoff titled NCIS: Origins.

Rocky Carroll’s Leon Vance will also return in the original show’s season 22 that will premiere this fall on CBS.