‘NCIS: Hawai’i’ Showrunners Give Hope to Bringing ‘New Orleans’ and ‘Los Angeles’ Stars to New Series (Exclusive)

NCIS: Hawai’i Season 2 will kick off with another crossover with the mothership NCIS series, but the door is still open for Vanessa Lachey to work alongside LL Cool J and Chris O’Donnell. In a recent exclusive interview with PopCulture, NCIS: Hawai’i showrunners Christopher Silber and Jan Nash said they would be “happy” to welcome NCIS: Los Angeles cast members to the show. They are also “always open” to including characters from NCIS: New Orleans, even though they chose not to bring any to Hawaii when New Orleans was canceled.

“I’ll speak for myself, but Jan’s heard me say it 7,000 times. I am happy to crossover with any show, anywhere, anytime. Of course, we’d love to work with LA,” Silber, who has worked on all NCIS shows except Los Angeles, said.

Silber added that he “admires” what his Los Angeles counterparts have done, joking that he has been “running parallel with them forever.” It “would be a lot of fun” to work with the Los Angeles team, Silber said. Nash added that they would “crossover with any show that wants to crossover with us.”

NCIS: Hawai’i went into production almost immediately after NCIS: New Orleans ended in May 2021. Silber was one of the executive producers on the Scott Bakula-starring show and joined Nash and Matt Bosack (SEAL Team) to develop the series set in the Aloha State. While it took about two seasons for NOLA to begin to feel like its own show, Nash, Bosack and Silber had a sense early on of what Hawai’i would be like.

“I think that we had a very strong interest in really doing something that felt like it was a part of the franchise, but its own thing,” Nash explained. “So it really was less about [making it stand on its own] than just really having a sense that, in the same way, that New Orleans had been a show that had really honored what was great about the city of New Orleans, we wanted to make a show that was true to what was great about Hawaii. Just by virtue of putting it in Hawaii, it was going to be a different show than any of the others.”

Diversity has also been important at every step of the NCIS: Hawai’i process. “It’s very important to us, it’s also very important to CBS, that we have a diversity of voices in every level of our show and it’s something we continue to strive to do,” Silber said. “We have diverse voices in our writer’s room, in our cast, with our directors, with our crew, and we’re continuing to make it more and more diverse every step of the way.”

NCIS: Hawai’i is one of the few TV shows granted a physical DVD release, which hits stores on Sept. 6. For Nash and Silber, they see this as validation from CBS and Paramount. They could have just kept it on Paramount+ and called it a day, but they didn’t.

“We like anything that seems to indicate that Paramount CBS is excited about our show and its prospects,” Silber said.”I assume that they’re only making DVDs because they think people are going to buy DVDs… We always want them to feel confident in the show. We want them to feel confident in the stories we’re telling and the way we’re running our show and the way the audience is going to respond to it. It really does seem to be an indication that they remain confident and that’s what we want.”

NCIS: Hawai’i Season 2 begins on Sept. 19 at 10 p.m. ET, following the first half of the NCIS crossover, which starts at 9 p.m. ET. The NCIS: Hawai’i Season 1 will be available in stores on Sept. 6 and includes 45 minutes of featurettes, deleted or extended scenes, and a gag reel. The season is also available to stream on Paramount+.