Donald P. Bellisario, producer and screenwriter, appears to be associated with some of the most prominent television titles in the crime investigation genre. And especially with stories in which the protagonists are military veterans, as is the case with Magnum, JAG, or its spin-off NCIS, known as Navy: Criminal Investigation, among others.
Particularly notable, due to its longevity, is the latter, which premiered its twentieth installment last September and barely three months ago, CBS announced its renewal for a twenty-first season. NCIS follows federal agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service’s Major Case Response Team investigating possible terrorist crimes.
The team of agents and medical examiners was led, until the nineteenth series’ fourth episode, by ex-Marine Leroy Jethro Gibbs, played by Mark Harmon. The actor from titles such as Reasonable Doubts or Wyatt Earp left the lead role of the series, although he continued to work in fiction as an executive producer. He was replaced by Gary Cole, an actor with extensive experience with leading roles in series such as The Good Fight, Desperate Housewives or True Blood.
More than 400 episodes support a series that premiered its first season in September 2003 and has never been among the most watched in the United States. For example, in Spain it can be seen on the AXN channel, on SkyShowtime and from today new episodes are coming on Neox.
Character and sequence
Donald P. Bellisario was a Marine in the late 1950s and, perhaps for this reason, the protagonists in many of his productions are or were members of the US Armed Forces.
Tom Selleck’s character in Magnum (1980–1988) was a student at the United States Naval Academy and a Vietnam officer and veteran. Jan-Michael Vincent plays a veteran on Airwolf and JAG commander Harm Rabb Jr., the predecessor to NCIS, is a former Navy aviator. In Navy: Criminal Investigation, the main character is a Marine Corps retiree who was a gunnery sergeant and a sniper.
NCIS, as an original series, spawned spin-off titles such as NCIS: Los Angeles, which premiered in 2009; NCIS: New Orleans, released in September 2014; and NCIS: Hawaii, the fourth series in the franchise that comes to light in September 2021. Bellisario went so far as to sue CBS, arguing that his contract entitled him to develop any spin-off of the original series.
