‘NCIS: Hawai’i’ Showrunners Tease Jane Tennant’s ‘Geographically Undesirable’ Romance for Season 2 (Exclusive)

NCIS: Hawai’i Season 1 ended with a big cliffhanger for Special Agent in Charge Jane Tennant, played by Vanessa Lachey. Just as her relationship with Capt. Joe Milius seemed to be taking off, he had to be transferred back to Washington, D.C., leading to an unknown future for the two. In an exclusive interview with PopCulture, NCIS: Hawai’i showrunners Christopher Silber and Jan Nash teased where the “geographically undesirable” relationship can go.

Silber assured us that we will see more of Enver Gjokaj, who plays Milius, in Season 2, even if there is a whole continent and half an ocean between him and Jane. “They have a great connection and we also love the character and we love the actor who plays Milius, so we certainly intend to see him again,” Silber said. “He has not disappeared from our world.”

The relationship also adds to the multi-dimensional portrayal of Jane. Silber and Nash don’t want audiences just to see her as a boss. She is also a single mother raising two children and that part of her life will continue to be essential to the series, Silber noted.

Season 1 also established another romantic relationship between FBI Special Agent Kate Whistler (Tori Anderson) and NCIS Special Agent Lucy Tara (Yasmine Al-Bustami). The series has to find a perfect balance between these personal stories and the crimes the Pearl Harbor team investigates. It was “very important” to Nash, Silber, and co-creator Matt Bosack to take audiences into the home lives of their characters from the very beginning, Nash said.

“Any individual episode, you have to balance the urgency of the case with how much of a personal story it can or cannot support,” Nash, who also worked on NCIS: New Orleans, Black Lightning, and Without a Trance, explained. “If you’re in a situation where you’ve got a missing child, then you can’t cut away to go talk about somebody’s birthday party. So we always want to try to make sure that our stories are character-rich and how much they can actually hold a character story is really a function of the crime show.”

“At the end of the day, we are telling Navy crime stories and those stories have to be interesting and we have to leave enough room for those,” Nash continued. “But some episodes have less urgency and that leaves you more room for a B story or a C story to exist in there that really sort of flushes out the characters more.”

Silber, who has worked on every NCIS show except NCIS: Los Angeles, gave Nash credit for making sure that scenes would be cut from mysteries, not the personal stories they want to tell. “Jan and I have worked on many different procedural shows and it always used to be the thing that got cut. We didn’t want that,” Silber said. “We wanted our characters to have lived in lives as well as solve great Navy crime.”

Another really fascinating story Hawai’i introduced in Season 1 is the relationship between Alex Tarrant’s Kai Holman and his father, Wally (Moses Goods). Kai reluctantly returned home to care for his father and is also the newest member of the team at the show’s beginning. Although Alex “informed” how Silber and Nash would tell Kai’s story, the team had a rough outline for what they wanted with the character. But Alex’s “gifts” brought Kai to life, Nash said.

“Alex, certainly because of his gifts, made it that much better, but it was something that was important to us,” Nash explained. “Again, we’re a little bit of a dog with a bone. Those character stories and making sure that these characters had lives beyond the office were part of the DNA of this show from the beginning. We had some ideas of what kinds of stories we were going to tell, but as the season unfolded, they changed based on the things that we like to write to and the way the actors did it. It has just made the show that much better because of it.”

NCIS: Hawai’i Season 2 kicks off on Sept. 19 at 10 p.m. ET as the second half of a crossover with NCIS. The first season will be released on DVD on Sept. 6 and includes 45 minutes of featurettes, deleted or extended scenes, and a gag reel. The show is also available to stream on Paramount+.