‘NCIS’ Boss Explains Tony’s Director Appointment and What’s Next for McGee and Mateo (Exclusive)

NCIS made it big for the premiere of its 24th season. Not only does the long-running CBS drama welcome back Michael Weatherly as a (changed and more mature) Tony DiNozzo, but it also reveals who was shot during that standoff between Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) and McGee’s (Sean Murray) son, Mateo (Patrick Keleher). And gives the agency a new permanent director after the death of Vance (Rocky Carroll). TV Insider spoke with showrunner Steven D. Binder about this and more. Warning: spoilers for the NCIS Premiere of season 24 coming soon!

Turns out Mateo shot Tony in the arm after chatting on the dark web (thanks, Boris from NCIS: Tony and Ziva!) led the former agent towards him. (Mateo got into trouble after turning to the wrong people to falsify documents when his mother went missing last season.) LaRoche (Seamus Dever), the new director, refuses to let McGee, Torres or Tony work on the case. That doesn’t stop them – and when it all leads to the kidnapping of SecNav’s daughter and it’s the team, particularly Tony, who brings her home, well, LaRoche is out of a job, the team doesn’t have to worry about his job, and there’s a new director: Tony!

SecNav reveals that she had already asked him and he had refused, due to “complicated” timing. But now that he’s helicopter parenting in Washington with Tali at a boarding school in Boston and Ziva (Côte de Pablo) working near her at a language institute, she sees no reason for him to say no again. Plus, she already talked to Ziva, who wanted him to take the job the first time he was offered it. He doesn’t have time to decide either: the press release has already been published.

Below, showrunner Steven D. Binder details the premiere and reveals what’s next for director Tony DiNozzo and everyone else.

Tony is the new director. Was that always the plan once you knew you were going to bring him back? When did you start to think that this was the path you were going to take after Vance? Because SecNav had already asked him, you put that in the episode.

Steven D. Binder: RIGHT. There were reasons for this. You try not to get too excited about things creatively until you know they’re going to happen for sure. And I think once we knew for sure that Michael Weatherly was coming back to the show, we started to wonder, OK, well, what is it? We didn’t know exactly. You always have a plan, but then you always change plans. So we didn’t know exactly who was going to be shot, or what was going to happen during this confrontation. And then once we knew it was a lock with Michael Weatherly, I was like, “What if Michael Weatherly gets shot?”

Robert Voets/CBS

And at the same time, what role could he play in the series? Leon Vance’s 500th episode — they were two completely unrelated things, but all of a sudden we had a huge opening at NCIS and now you’re like, well, what can we do with Michael Weatherly? And you’re like, “Well, we have a huge opening, does that make sense, right off the bat?” » And then while we were thinking about it. “What can he really do?” We don’t want him back in the bullpen as a regular. First of all, there aren’t enough chairs. And do we create a second team for him? There aren’t enough chairs yet. And Gary Cole is fantastic as the team leader, so what do we really do with this character? And it seemed like the kid who pulls the fire alarm at the high school and you come back and he’s the principal, that seemed like the right decision for that character. We can show his maturity and yet he also remains the epitome of Tony DiNozzo. This seemed like a big internal conflict for him as a director and it was also a lot of fun for the audience to watch.

Also NCIS had mentioned the possibility of him leading his own team, so you already talked about it years ago.

Yes.

With Tony as the new director, is this a position that could span multiple seasons? We saw how long Rocky stayed as director. Does this mean Michael is not only back for this season, but potentially more?

I mean, we take these things one season at a time. However, you blink and it’s season 24. So I don’t really know. Network television is a real hand-to-hand job when it comes to getting those scripts on time. We do 20 episodes per season. So we proceed step by step. It’s certainly great to have him in this chair, and I don’t see any reason why it should slow down, but I don’t know if we’re looking that far ahead yet. We’re shooting episode 7 and thinking about episode 13. You talk about season 25, I’m going to need a pacemaker, we continue to talk about that.

You talked about how we’ll see how Tony has changed. And when we talked about the finale, you talked about the storytelling and how you were going to find the next director. With Michael in the role, it obviously changes things, but it also means you can do different things with the dynamic within the team because he was a part of it. He worked with McGee, he worked with Palmer (Brian Dietzen). He doesn’t know the others. He must learn to know them. So what does this mean for what we’re going to see for these dynamics now that he’s their boss?

I’m glad you asked this question because that’s really where the fun is. You saw a little bit of that in Episode 1, but there wasn’t really a lot of time. And what’s more, he wasn’t in the building. In episode 2, he will now be in the building, he will be the director. And one of the things to resolve about that is what is his relationship with all these other characters, because this has always been a relationship show and we run the gamut. We think of Parker and Tony as two people on a first date, getting to know each other, laughing at each other’s jokes, maybe becoming a little awkward. I won’t tell you exactly why, but you’ll see, but Knight (Katrina Law) sort of adopts a mother hen role towards Tony, making sure he sticks to his diet and things like that.

Obviously Jimmy Palmer and Tony have known each other for a while, but we’re redefining their dynamic in a really fun way and you’ll see that in issue two.

And then most importantly it’s McGee and Tony because their relationship started out as a college student and a frat boy hazing him. They are both much older now. They are both parents. They’re going to relate to each other on a very different level. And if you zoom out, the first one is really about being a parent. McGee is new to having a son. The whole episode is about what’s going on in her relationship with her son. Tali is not in the show, but (Tony’s) helicopter parenting. And then the main story of SecNav is that of a mother whose child was kidnapped. And I think that’s really what this show is about, the McGee Tony dynamic, being parents together.

Looks like they might need to find their balance again? Because at the beginning of the premiere, they bring up things they haven’t talked about – Tony didn’t know about Mateo and it had been a while, and McGee didn’t know Tony was back in Washington.

Yeah. You can go either way with this. I think the way we’ve done it is not necessarily that they’ve lost touch and need to find their balance again. They’re old friends who can’t talk for four years, then talk for five hours and it’s like yesterday. …. Dramatically, it helped us in some areas. We didn’t want certain people to know certain things. But the idea, a year could go by without you talking or Tony was on the run and he could have called McGee and said, “McGee, I need you,” but McGee wasn’t on that show. So he just went about his business and maybe did his friend McGee a favor and didn’t call him to (bring) him to this. And then life happens and you’re not always there for all of it.

Greg Gayne/CBS

Speaking of being a parent, because as McGee points out, Mateo didn’t trust him and they have things to work on. And yes, the murder charge was dropped, but does that mean there’s no fear of legal consequences for Mateo? What’s going on there and what will we see from McGee and Mateo’s dynamic as a result?

We will return to this scenario. There are consequences for Mateo. I think they will be – resolved is the wrong word, but I think the outcome of these legal consequences will be the starting point of another very interesting dynamic for McGee. And I don’t want to spoil it for you, but it’s really awesome. It’s one of those things you don’t expect, and then once it happens you’re like, “Oh no, it’s perfect for this show.” »

Is this the end of LaRoche?

LaRoche is not a bad guy. He’s not evil, at least not yet. He just doesn’t listen, but he’s certainly a very interesting character. He’s a fantastic actor. So that’s the end of LaRoche for now. His entrance was always about power, seeking power, and he finally gets it, he’s the director of NCIS. And once that’s taken away and the musical is over, it’s the encore. That’s not to say there isn’t a sequel for this character, but that’s certainly how his arc is going for now.

What can you say about seeing Côté again? And are Torres and Ziva in contact? Because there was a line that Torres had, and I was trying to figure out, did Tony tell him that or maybe Ziva told him?

I guess Tony and Torres had time to talk, but Ziva also has McGee’s (number). It’s not difficult to get contact information for these people, so I assume they are all in contact when…