‘NCIS’ Season 20 Looks Completely Different Without Mark Harmon

NCIS Season 20 kicked off on Monday night, and the show looks completely different without longtime star Mark Harmon. Parade noted that for the new season, producers created a fresh intro with a montage of the new cast members, including actor Gary Cole, who plays Alden Parker. Cole’s character was chosen as the replacement for Harmon’s Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs, who exited the show early in Season 19 and is now living a peaceful life in Alaska.

Notably, ahead of the NCIS season premiere, series showrunner Steven S. Binder teased that the new episodes will be a “season of love.” Speaking to TV Line,  Binder spoke about some of the relationship dynamics that will be explored, saying, “I’ve been calling it ‘the season of love.’ So we may see a bunch of things happening, with a bunch of our characters.” Contrasting the approach to the romantic connection between Special Agent Knight (Katrina Law) and Dr. Jimmy Palmer (Brian Dietzen) as compared to past ones such as Special Agents Anthony D. “Tony” DiNozzo, Jr. (Michael Weatherly) and Ziva David (Cote de Pablo), Binder explained, “This one is something that we birthed ourselves, in a vacuum. We didn’t want to go down the same road we went down before. Instead, we wanted it to play out more realistically – two people at work, who actually having feelings towards each other, and they’re not being so coy about it.”

NCIS Season 19 ended back in May, and during the final episode, fans got to see two fan-favorite characters become a couple after months of romantic tension. In the season finale, Palmer and Knight had their very first on-screen kiss, a big moment that had been building over the season, as the pair were regularly seen being very flirty. Ahead of the finale, Dietzen spoke about the romantic tension between his and Law’s characters. 

“When you have a wonderful time on something that is a ‘date-not-a-date,’ and then you both choose not to talk about it to one another that inevitably will bring up some sort of, ‘Hey, why are we not talking about this, we had a really good time?’” Dietzen told Parade.com in an exclusive interview. “I think the next natural progression of that is should we talk about ‘Is there something there?’ I was happy that they wrote this episode to address that and say maybe there is something there.” Fans can catch up on past seasons of NCIS anytime on Paramount+. Those interested in trying out a free trial of Paramount+ can do so by clicking here.