NCIS: Sydney Boss Cheers ‘More Ambitious’ Season 2 (Trip to Darwin Included!), ‘Romantic Tension’ Ahead
It’s a g’week to be an NCIS: Sydney fan, with Season 2 of the spinoff from Down Under kicking off this Friday at 8/7c, on CBS.
NCIS: Sydney follows an eclectic team of U.S. NCIS Agents and Australian Federal Police (AFP) officers who have been grafted into a multi-national task force, to keep naval crimes in check in the most contested patch of ocean on the planet.
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The merged team is led by NCIS Special Agent Michelle Mackey, played by DC’s Legends of Tomorrow alum Olivia Swann, and her 2IC AFP counterpart, Sergeant Jim “JD” Dempsey, played by Todd Lasance (Spartacus: War of the Damned). The cast also includes Sean Sagar (Fate: The Winx Saga) as NCIS Special Agent DeShawn Jackson, Tuuli Narkle (Bad Behaviour) as AFP Liaison Officer Constable Evie Cooper, Mavournee Hazel (Neighbours) as AFP Forensic Scientist Bluebird “Blue” Gleeson, and William McInnes (Blue Heelers) as AFP Forensic Pathologist Dr. Roy Penrose.
In the Season 2 opener, titled “Heart Starter,” with rogue assassin “Ana Niemus” (Fringe‘s Georgina Haig) on the run and suspicion swirling around Colonel Rankin (Lewis Fitz-Gerald), the team must do whatever it takes to crack the case on DeShawn’s first day as boss — “even if that means waking the dead.” (And no, that’s not a metaphor.)
TVLine hopped on a Zoom with NCIS: Sydney showrunner Morgan O’Neill to get a taste for the internationally flavoured series’ encore.
TVLINE | Big picture, how would you compare Season 2 to Season 1? Is there anything you decided to lean into? For example, JD seems to be a funnier guy this season.
I think, on a global scale, we’ve just been more ambitious — in terms of the production values, in terms of the breadth of the stories we’re telling. But one of the things that’s allowed us to be ambitious is that we now know the characters. We’re not in those first-season days where you’re still trying to work out who they are and how they interact with one another and what the allegiances are, who likes what and who doesn’t.
Now that we’ve established those characters, we have that fabulous opportunity to deepen and to peel back the lid and to actually see what makes these guys tick in a much more profound way, and lean into what we’ve discovered are the qualities of the characters that we like the most. It’s an interesting observation that JD’s funnier, because for me, that’s the kind of deepening that happens in workplaces all around the world. You meet the person on the first day, and you’re like, “I’m not sure I really like them….”
TVLINE | But then you get comfortable with one another and you realize, “Oh, I can make this joke.”
“I can make this joke,” or you go through a shared experience that experience bonds you and opens a door, and you walk into a different realm of intimacy of familiarity or affection. But I just feel like, overall, we’ve gone bigger, and we’ve gone deeper.
TVLINE | The logline for this Season 2 premiere has some fans curious about “DeShawn’s first day as boss,” like, “Where’s Mackey? Where’s JD?”
Well, look, without spoiling the first episode, there are obvious repercussions for where we left things the end of the first season. A whole bunch of decisions had been made to get JD’s son back, and someone has to “pay the ferryman.” These are not decisions that happen in a vacuum. Protocols have been broken, trusts have been breached, and at some point, the organization is going to come down and say, “How are we going to get through this?” And then, “How are we going to get through this with Mackey and JD sidelined?”
While Special Agent in Charge Ken Carter (Five Bedrooms‘ Bert LaBonté) works out what the hell to do, what happens next is that the most senior NCIS agent in the building steps up and takes the reins, and that’s DeShawn — much to Evie’s delight, because she doesn’t think DeShawn is boss material, let’s say, and she’s more than happy to make him aware of that. [Laughs] The irony is that he actually turns out to be a pretty great boss, in his own way.
TVLINE | I somewhat famously compiled for our readers a glossary of Australian slang for Season 1. Can I expect to make any additions for Season 2? For example, from one of the new episodes, I now know what a “celebrant” is.
Here’s the thing that is so interesting, and stop me if I’ve told you this, but I lived in America for 15 years, and when I moved there, I thought, “We’re kind of the same people, right? We have a different accent, but we speak the same language, and culturally, we’re the same.” And then, halfway through it, I realized that there are, like, chasms between us in ways that are really invisible.
I walked into a Canter’s Deli on Fairfax [in Los Angeles], and I walked up to the cold cuts section — we say “the meat counter” — and I said to the lady behind the counter, “Can I have one-and-a-half pounds of pastrami?” She said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.” I said, “I’d just like one-and-a-half pounds of pastrami,” and she goes, “I don’t understand what you’re asking me.” I said, “OK, I’m confused here, too. I would like some pastrami, and I would like one-and-a-half pounds.” She said, “Ohhhh, a pound-and-a -half!” The point is, there are tiny little nuanced differences in the language which you take for granted.
I would’ve thought that everyone knows what a celebrant is. What is a celebrant in America?
TVLINE | I suppose the closest term is officiant?
The officiant, is it? Well, there you go. And frankly, I don’t want to put up my hand as being on the right side of history here, but a celebrant sounds way cooler than officiant. You know what I mean? So, that might be something we can gift the Americans!
TVLINE | Any distinctly Australian locales you’re going to be using this season?
Heaps. I mean, we end up in the top end of Australia, up in Darwin, for the climactic last two episodes of the season, and without going into too fine of detail about what that is, because I don’t want to spoil it, you can imagine what’d it be like. The difference is as if if the show was set in Rhode Island, and then you ended up in Texas or Alabama. Sydney’s on the bottom of the southeast part of Australia, and Darwin is in the very top north. It’s the bit that faces Indonesia, and it’s tropical, and it’s filled with saltwater crocodiles…. It’s like the frontier. It’s incredibly different, and it’s exotic in ways that the rest of the show isn’t. So, yeah, that’s part of the ambition I’m talking about. The show was really successful in its first season, and that allowed us confidence — and allowed the network to have confidence in us, asking to stretch our wings even further.
As I said to you the first time we met, my vision of NCIS: Sydney is that it’s the gateway drug to NCIS Australia, because Australia is this vast continent. It’s the world’s largest island. It’s one of the most remote places on Earth and a little bit like the U.S. So, yeah, the landscape, the backdrop is much richer in Season 2.
TVLINE | Any personal runners, personal storylines, for any of the characters?
For sure. As I said earlier, one of the ambitions for the show was to deepen our characters and to let our audience in a little bit more, in an NCIS way — which is not to say we do these enormous emotional dumps, because that’s not the show. We drop little breadcrumbs. I don’t know how many seasons it was before we worked out that the ship that Gibbs was building in his basement was named after his dead daughter, but I think it was four or five. Like, 100 episodes, from when we established that boat to where we learned of its significance. That’s one of the secret sauces of the show, that the contract with the audience is “nothing is going to be incidental.” So, hold onto all those tidbits and information, because I promise they’ll actually make sense at some point, even if they don’t make sense now or tomorrow.
In the first episode, there’s a pretty significant revelation about Mackey’s backstory and family life that I’d love to hear your thoughts on. But it really does place a slightly different filter on how we see Mackey interact with her team and with the wider world, because you’re now seeing it with this information that you didn’t have in the first season. Hopefully, a lot of the decisions she made in that first season come into greater context or make more sense, in light of the revelation in the first episode.
TVLINE | Anything on the romance front to preview for Season 2?
It’s really interesting, because once this first season had gone to air, a few friends would send me random musings from the Internet, from people who had watched the show and enjoyed the show and had their thoughts about where it was going to go or what it meant, and it’s interesting watching the audience process what they think is going on beneath the surface of our characters. I love that. I find it fascinating.
TVLINE | Like Evie and DeShawn? Season 1 told me they are clearly heading towards an intersection point romantically.
That’s interesting. Some people look at that relationship as “brother and sister,” constantly bickering, undermining each other, competing for Mom and Dad’s attention, and I could certainly see that. Some people feel like there’s a natural movement towards a romantic intersection. I don’t want to preempt any of that.
I will say, without being too cryptic, that there is a romantic tension [between two characters] that emerges across Season 2, and it really hits its zenith in the last couple of episodes and hopefully takes the audience a bit by surprise.
Want scoop on NCIS: Sydney, or for any other TV show ? Shoot an email to [email protected], and your question may be answered via Matt’s Inside Line!
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