New ‘NCIS’ Franchise Crossover Planned for Next Season

NCIS will have a franchise-wide crossover in the 2022-2023 season, gifting fans a supersized treat. According to TV Insider, NCIS: LA executive producer R. Scott Gemmill revealed a crossover between the three shows is in motion and it seems to be penciled in next season once all three series are on the same page.

“We’ve talked about [a crossover] a lot, and actually the studio [recently] asked me about it,” Gemmill told the outlet. “It’s only a matter of logistics. If we were going to do it, we’d want to do it over all three series. Doing one crossover with one show sort of feels like you’re leaving somebody out… I’ve already talked to the other showrunners, everyone’s sort of up for it. It’s just the practicality of pulling it off is a little tricky.”

The franchise has had plenty of crossovers in the past, but the series was landlocked at the time with the original series, Los Angeles and the canceled New Orleans spinoff. Now we have NCIS: Hawai’i. This presents a few extra challenges for production.

“It’s a little easier for us because we have a good size cast and we’re used to shuffling people out in a way for different reasons,” Gemmill added. NCIS executive producer Steven Binder added the problems with a crossover, though.

“You lose actors not just for a crossover. We lose them for the shows that we’re doing on either side of the crossover,” Binder said. “I believe it’s in the cards, just based on how well it went [with NCIS and Hawai’i]. Last season was a trial run. Hopefully this season will have greased the wheels a little more.”

Hawai’i EP Jan Nash echoed these sentiments and cited how “fun” the last crossover was between the original series and Hawai’i. “Chris Silber and Megan Bacharach wrote a wonderful episode and it ended up containing so many bits and pieces that the fans could love and that we could build on, and hopefully it won’t be the last we’ll see of any of those characters on NCIS Hawai’i,” Nash said.

TV Insider adds that we might get a fourth addition to the crossover fun, with a potential return of JAG stars David James Elliott and Catherine Bell. “I’m still really good friends with David and Catherine and talk to them all the time, and I’ve written some stuff for both of them in the last little bit, trying to get some new stuff off the ground,” Gemmill told the outlet. “I think it could happen. I love working with them. It was such a treat to bring them both back and to be able to write for the same character and the same actor – for me, it was probably 20 plus years with [them]. And yeah, they’re both up for it.”