'NCIS: Hawai'i' Showrunners Share How They Choose Cases for Vanessa Lachey's Team to Solve (Exclusive)

The NCIS teams have tackled hundreds of cases since the mothership series debuted 20 years ago, meaning the teams writing new episodes have to get creative with each new spinoff. NCIS: Hawai'i showrunners Jan Nash and Christopher Silber talked about how they choose cases for Vanessa Lachey's Jane Tennant and her team to solve in the beautiful Hawaiian islands in a recent interview with PopCulture. The executive producers also shared why they didn't think about repeating what Hawaii Five-0 and Magnum P.I. did in the Aloha State.

All versions of NCIS have had to find ways to connect crimes with the Navy and quickly explain why they would be solving a case and not local or other federal authorities. Silber, who also worked on NCIS and NCIS: New Orleans, admitted that in their writers' room, they will often search for an interesting case and then find a way to connect it to the Navy or the Department of Defense. Sometimes the cases are "very much within the world of things" that the real NCIS deals with daily, but in other cases, the stories will go "a little farther afield."

The real "NCIS is they are a very versatile law enforcement agency," Silber pointed out. The Navy goes beyond what even the FBI does, "in that they work with espionage and they work with counter-terrorism and counterintelligence, et cetera. So, it does give you a lot of opportunities to tell different kinds of interesting stories." Silber said.

Bringing the franchise to Hawaii also brings greater opportunities for globe-trotting cases. We've already seen this with the finale taking the story to The Philippines. That was a little difficult for NCIS: New Orleans to do, Silber noted.

Nash also pointed out that Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam is a huge location where thousands of people work. "It is a good size town, which is going to lead to more opportunities for different kinds of crimes, just because you're not in a small section of a Navy or air force population," Nash, who also worked on NCIS: New Orleans, said. "We've got a huge group of personnel, contractors, et cetera that are all over the island. So it does make the scope of the crimes even bigger, [even] if you're only looking at the Hawaii part."

There is only one possible negative aspect of setting a show in Hawaii. The series debuted just after the Magnum P.I. reboot wrapped its run on CBS (before NBC saved it) and two years after Hawaii Five-0 ended. Nash said they didn't even really worry about coming so soon after two other Hawaii-set shows ended.

"It's much harder to create or write something if you're writing [to avoid] something versus really just trying to come up with the thing that makes it uniquely yours or that you are excited about," Nash said. "So we sort of moved forward with a lot of enthusiasm for what this show could be." There were only "isolated incidents" where they said they couldn't do something because Hawaii Five-0 already did it. The one example Nash came up with was dropping a dog because a character on Hawaii Five-0 had one.

NCIS: Hawai'i returns for a second season on Sept. 19 at 10 p.m. ET, following the NCIS Season 20 premiere on CBS. The first season is available to stream on Paramount+. It is also available on DVD, with 45 minutes of featurettes, deleted or extended scenes, and a gag reel.