NCIS: what happened to Jimmy's wife? Brian Dietzen was told before the writers wrote it
There is no episode where Breena Palmer dies. The show skipped the scene entirely, which was the point, and the actor who had to carry it knew it was coming long before a script existed.
Breena Palmer — played by Michelle Pierce, who first appeared on 2 March 2010 and grew from Jimmy's girlfriend to his fiancée to his wife across a decade — died of COVID-19 in December 2020, off screen and between episodes. NCIS revealed it in season 18, episode 7, "The First Day," which aired on 9 February 2021. Jimmy tells the team; he also tells them that pandemic restrictions meant his last conversations with her were on video calls. The rest of the episode is a murder investigation happening around a man who is not okay.
Why the writers chose Jimmy
Season 18 was built under pandemic conditions. It ran 16 episodes instead of a full order, production began on 9 September 2020 and didn't wrap until 29 March 2021, and two of its installments were reworked from scripts abandoned when season 17 was cut short. A show shooting under COVID protocols wanted to address COVID, and it wanted to do it without removing anyone from the squad room.
"We don't want to lose a team member. So the prospect of having Jimmy lose his wife, the most optimistic team member lose someone, came to the table and they thought it would be a great storytelling mechanic — albeit very, very sad," Dietzen told Entertainment Tonight in 2021.
Jimmy Palmer had spent eighteen seasons as the cheerful one. That was the qualification.
What Dietzen knew, and when
Dietzen was briefed by producers and writers well ahead of delivery, including conversations with writer Margaret Lester, so that the script wasn't the first he heard of it.
"I had been told that this was going to happen, that Jimmy was going to lose his wife before I received this script. I was notified ahead of time and prepared for it, I suppose, emotionally," he told Entertainment Tonight in 2021.
He later said the response that mattered came from viewers who'd had the same year: people telling him they were glad the show had acknowledged those who died during that stretch.
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The scene the audience never got
The absent goodbye became a problem Dietzen decided to solve himself. He'd been given approval by showrunner Steve Binder years earlier to pitch as a writer and hadn't acted on it; a dual embolic stroke in his cerebellum shortly before the pandemic changed his thinking. He co-wrote season 19's "The Helpers" with executive producer Scott Williams — the first acting cast member to co-write an episode in the show's history — which aired on 28 February 2022.
In it, Jimmy collapses in the lab, and Michelle Pierce returns for a dream sequence in a field.
"Jimmy never got to say goodbye to his wife on-camera, and the audience never got to see her and say goodbye either," Dietzen told TVLine in 2022, explaining why he wrote the scene in.
What happened to the family
Jimmy stayed Chief Medical Examiner and raised the couple's daughter Victoria, born in 2015, as a single parent, moving his mother in to help. Breena's death is treated in later seasons as the line that splits the character in two — Dietzen's own framing is that grief leaves a character with a before and an after.
For the record: Michelle Pierce's great-grandmother was Helen Bray, a star of American silent film.
Previously we wrote: What happened to Randy in NCIS: Origins? The season 2 cliffhanger
