The first thing Sam Hanna (LL Cool J) does in “NCIS: New York” is let his phone ring while he works a covert job in Dubai, and by the time he calls his old friend back, the man is dead on a bench in Central Park. That is how CBS opened its seventh “NCIS” spinoff on Tuesday, October 6th, in the 9 p.m. hour between the season 24 premiere of “NCIS” and the season three premiere of “NCIS: Origins.” It arrives three years after “NCIS: Los Angeles” ended and pairs Sam with Nick Schaeffer (Scott Caan), played by the actor who was Danny “Danno” Williams on “Hawaii Five-0”. The episode is simply called “Pilot,” but what it builds is a homecoming that starts with a guilty conscience.
R. Scott Gemmill, who also created “The Pitt,” created the series, and Byron Balasco runs it as showrunner. Robyn Wells (Jennifer Beals) heads the New York field office at the Brooklyn Navy Yard as its Assistant Special Agent in Charge, and Jimmy Palmer (Brian Dietzen) checks in from the flagship by video call. Critics were sent the pilot ahead of time, but this review is written from the recaps and reviews that followed the broadcast, not from a screener. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “NCIS: New York” season one, episode one.
The episode is simply called “Pilot,” but what it builds is a homecoming that starts with a guilty conscience.”
The dead man is Jack Halloway, a Navy reservist and tugboat captain whose death has been made to look like a suicide. Sam was close to Jack’s father and had known Jack his whole life, and he knows Jack’s wife is expecting a baby, which is exactly why he refuses to believe the man took his own life. That is a conflict of interest the size of a battleship, and Robyn lets him work the case anyway, partnering him with Nick, who has been called in on his day off. Sam tells everyone he is in town for one case only. Nobody watching a series premiere is fooled by that line, and the recaps suggest the show does not expect anyone to be.
The rest of the office arrives quickly, and the pilot sketches them in with a line or two each. Addy Ross (Jacqueline Byers) and Wyatt (Shane Harper) share what Variety called “a sibling-like relationship,” and Wyatt is still reeling from the sudden end of his engagement. Sean Sullivan (Devin Druid) is the tech specialist, and he is only at the Navy Yard because of a deal that keeps him out of prison for hacking the police pension fund. Balasco told TV Insider, “Sean is our wayward son that we want to show him the light.” Jimmy confirms on his call what Sam already suspected, that Jack was murdered, and the team goes to work.
The case itself is solid, familiar franchise machinery. Sam finds a stash of cash on Jack’s boat and bristles at the idea that his friend was dirty, and he turns out to be right, because Jack’s first mate, Dave, planted the money under orders from a crew of mercenaries. Those men were being smuggled into the country off the boat, and Jack was killed for finding out. Dave cooperated because the mercenaries claimed to be holding his online girlfriend, Katrina, who, it turns out, never existed at all, because Dave had been catfished. Their real target is an NYU student, the daughter of a Russian oligarch, whose father’s rival paid them to snatch her as leverage.
The team traces the crew to an empty nightclub in Bushwick and is waiting there when the mercenaries bring the young woman in, which sets off the extended firefight that TV Insider and Screen Rant both single out. Nick ends up in hand-to-hand combat with one of the gunmen, Sam shoots the man dead to save his new partner’s life, and the student gets home safe. Variety’s Aramide Tinubu wrote that the show “works like a well-oiled machine,” and that is a fair description of this stretch. It is efficient, it is loud, and none of it is likely to be remembered by episode five, which is fine for a pilot whose real job is to introduce two men to each other.
Those two men are the reason to watch. Sam and Nick start trading insults almost as soon as they meet, most of them about the gap in their heights, and Variety called the jokes corny while conceding that “their banter is all in good fun.” What makes it work is that the show skipped the usual first-act hostility. Caan said at a press conference, as reported by Give Me My Remote, “I feel like there’s a cliché way to approach these sort of buddy setups, and I feel like we went with the opposite.” Screen Rant praised the show for moving “away from the bickering dynamic between partners that has been done countless times before.”
There is some weight under the jokes, too. Nick offers his condolences for Sam’s late wife, and he explains his own history, a family of cops and firefighters he tried to escape by going into finance before he came back to the job. LL Cool J has said the homecoming is meant to let viewers see the vulnerabilities in a man they watched for 14 seasons in Los Angeles. “Because don’t forget: He hasn’t been home in so long. He’s almost like a stranger in this place,” he told the New York Times, in remarks TheWrap quoted.
That idea pays off in the last scene, which reads on paper as the best one in the hour. Nick drives Sam to his favorite spot in the city, by a bridge, and makes his pitch, telling him, “This is where all the action is,” and adding, “I want to work with the best.” Sam pushes back that he is a stranger now, and Nick, who ran from a similar history, does not let him off the hook. Sam’s answer is the line the whole premiere has been walking toward. “All right, let’s see how it goes,” he says, and it lands as an agreement rather than a promise.
The cast is careful not to oversell that commitment. “Sam didn’t go into it with any preconceived notions. We’ll see what happens. And there’s no guarantee he’ll stay,” LL Cool J told TV Insider on the premiere red carpet, before adding, “It’s still TBD.” Caan revealed the writers once played with a version in which Sam turned the offer down. “We pitched this idea that he says no in the pilot and that we just keep going with that,” he told the outlet. “But we got him.” A show built around a man who might leave at any time has a built-in tension that most spinoffs have to invent.
The other decision that sets this one apart is where it was made. “NCIS: New York” was shot in the city, and Variety noted that the case moves “from Brooklyn to Queens and even the Diamond District in Midtown,” while Screen Rant pointed out that the flagship shoots in California even though it is set in Washington. Screen Rant called the new show “a throwback to the days when CBS had the flagship running alongside its Los Angeles and New Orleans spinoffs, and yet, each one of them had their own unique flavor.”
Ana Dumaraog of Screen Rant wrote that the show “opens with a strong-enough pilot that effectively addresses the urgent concerns plaguing it,” and that is roughly where this lands for us as well. The case of the week is disposable, the supporting team is still mostly a set of descriptions, and the Jimmy Palmer cameo is mostly a welcome mat for longtime viewers. The partnership is the asset, and the city is a close second. If Sam and Nick are still enjoying each other a few weeks from now, the network may have found its next long runner.
What Do You Think? Did the Sam and Nick partnership win you over in the first hour? Do you believe Sam is staying in New York for good? Which “NCIS” character would you most like to see cross over to the Navy Yard next?
See you on the next binge!
