Tony DiNozzo is back on NCIS from October 6, and Michael Weatherly says the bullpen did fine without him for 10 years
Tony DiNozzo is back in the NCIS bullpen on 6 October, and the first thing fans want to know is not what he has been up to — it is whether Ziva is in the car. The showrunner has now answered that, and the answer is a very carefully worded no.
Michael Weatherly walks back into the NCIS bullpen on 6 October, ten years after he walked out of it. The obvious question is not what Tony DiNozzo has been doing — the Paramount+ spinoff Tony & Ziva answered that — but who is not coming with him.
Executive producer Steven D. Binder gave TV Insider the tidiest possible answer. "In our universe, Tali is now a few hours away in boarding school, and Ziva is there with her," he said. "Whether or not her path will cross with our agents in D.C. is still an ongoing question — but rest assured, her presence will definitely be felt!"
Which is a showrunner saying no and leaving the door open in one breath. Cote de Pablo has not been announced for season 24. Binder's framing of the couple is worth reading twice: "Loving each other was never an issue. The problem has always been, can they be together without killing each other?"
How Tony ends up back at headquarters
The mechanics are deliberately mundane. Tony's private security firm is doing well enough to open a satellite office in Washington, and he was moving to D.C. anyway to be nearer to Tali. Then work finds him.
"While trying to drum up new clients for his upstart satellite office, an old contact of Tony's picks up some chatter involving NCIS. Tony is, of course, intrigued and decides to pay his old friends a surprise visit. Unfortunately, the reunion quickly goes sideways, and Tony finds himself in the middle of a five-alarm fire." — Steven D. Binder
He puts the fire out, the Pentagon decides it wants more DiNozzo, and the season-long arc has its excuse. Weatherly is careful about the tone. The bullpen, he said on Monday, has "for 10 years, [it's] been working just fine and well without him" — and the reunion "is not wrapped in nostalgia," though McGee is getting a new Mc-nickname out of it.
Read more: NCIS: New York premiere date and crossover preview
What is actually different about him
Weatherly's case is that the spinoff did work a decade of reruns could not. "NCIS: Tony & Ziva gave us a window into the emotional, paternal, responsible, mature side of DiNozzo," he said. "We got to see him being a father and making decisions where he was not just ego-driven."
- He thinks first now. "Rather than an instant knee-jerk reaction, he takes a beat and thinks," per Weatherly — while keeping the movie quotes.
- Most of the team are strangers. Alden Parker (Gary Cole), Nick Torres (Wilmer Valderrama), Jessica Knight (Katrina Law) and Kasie Hines (Diona Reasonover) all arrived after he left.
- Two old faces remain. Tim McGee (Sean Murray), who hits his 500th episode this season, and Jimmy Palmer (Brian Dietzen).
- He lands in a cliffhanger. Torres caught McGee's teenage son Mateo behaving strangely last season; the confrontation ended with a gunshot, and the premiere picks it up there.
The return is also a scheduling move, and Weatherly says so plainly: CBS is stacking Tuesday with NCIS, NCIS: New York with LL Cool J and Scott Caan, and NCIS: Origins, which puts Mark Harmon back on camera regularly. "I'm just happy that they invited me to this party," he said.
A franchise that has run for 23 years does not need nostalgia. It needs a reason for the audience to sit down at eight o'clock on a Tuesday, and three shows is a reason.
So, the answer people are typing into search tonight: Ziva is in the universe, a few hours up the road, unannounced. Tony is in D.C. from 6 October, 8/7c on CBS. Whether those two facts meet in one scene is the cliffhanger the network has not filmed.
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