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10 or so reasons why 'NCIS: New Orleans' is the most successful new broadcast drama in a decade | NOLA.com
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10 or so reasons why 'NCIS: New Orleans' is the most successful new broadcast drama in a decade
"NCIS: New Orleans" concludes its first season at 8 p.m. Tuesday (May 12) on WWL-TV. The episode, "My City," features guest appearances by Dylan Walsh, Steven Weber and Stacy Keach, and comes almost exactly two years after Gary Glasberg, show-running executive producer of "NCIS," pitched Mark Harmon, star and executive producer of "NCIS," on setting a "sweeps" episode of their show in New Orleans.
Harmon's reaction, according to Glasberg: "Gary, that's not a sweeps episode. That's a new show."
Averaging more than 15 million viewers a week (not counting millions more who watch via digital replay), "NCIS: New Orleans" would go on to become the most successful new drama in a decade in total audience, tracking all the way back to ABC's 2004 introduction of "Desperate Housewives."
Fox's hip-hop soap opera "Empire" made a mid-season move and grew each week into a huge hit with the 18-49 audience demographic advertisers love, but averaged 12.9 million total viewers (minus digital, which was huge) through its 12 episodes.
So "NCIS: New Orleans" wins a freshman-season finish as TV's No. 1 newcomer.
Here are 10 or so reasons why:
10. It had the best launch pad on television.
The "NCIS: New Orleans" premise and main characters were introduced during two March and April 2014 episodes of the Washington, D.C.-set, California-shot "NCIS," combining the characters from both shows in one story that brought Harmon to New Orleans for key filming (most of the interiors, including the opening nightclub scene featuring the Venice, Calif.-based band The Gumbo Brothers, were filmed in Los Angeles). Glasberg wrote both episodes.
"You sit in Armstrong Park, you put the people there, the cast," Harmon said during a break in filming of the two pilot episodes. "You dress them up in their uniforms, their outfits. And everybody starts working and you think, 'It's cooking.' And that feels pretty good."
9. A flood of New Orleans references in the introductory episodes made sure viewers -- and network executives -- understood where the spinoff would be set.
The "NCIS" episodes featured appearances by local musicians — including the Treme Brass Band, Daniel Farrow, Sweet Jones, Yes Ma'am, Luke Winslow King and the New Orleans Swamp Donkeys Traditional Jass Band — and name-dropped several eateries, including Mother's, Cafe du Monde and Chubbie's.
Tactically, the idea was to touch on pieces of New Orleans that visitors -- including network executives -- know best.
The tactic worked. The introductory "Crescent City" episodes drew about 17 million viewers in the "NCIS" time slot. CBS announced the show's pickup to series and and time slot in May.
8. It has the best lead-in on television.
CBS announced almost exactly a year ago that the spinoff would follow the mothership -- the most popular TV drama on Earth -- on Tuesday night. The franchise then poured itself into making the new sibling a success by deploying characters familiar to "NCIS" fans -- including Harmon's Jethro Gibbs, Diane Neal's Abigail Borin and Joe Spano's T.C. Fornell -- to the early episodes of the spinoff once it debuted in the fall.
The effect was like airing two-hour episodes of "NCIS," with old friends mingling with new faces who work in a very exotic locale. Ratings show that most "NCIS" fans get aboard and stay there through the spinoff every week.
"We want to work very hard to exist in the same universe, and in the same concentric universe," said Jeffrey Lieber, "NCIS: New Orleans" show-running executive producer, as regular-season production began. "The people who are part of the large overarching world over there are part of our world as well. We'll find ways to pull those people in and use them and use them in a way that a field office would."
7. The cast combines familiar and fresh TV faces.
Scott Bakula's Dwayne Pride runs the New Orleans Naval Criminal Investigative Service office -- no big deal when you consider that Bakula once ran a TV starship. With credits ranging from broad-appeal broadcast-network shows ("Quantum Leap," "Desperate Housewives") to genre ("Star Trek: Enterprise") to premium niche ("Behind the Candelabra," "Looking"), Bakula is someone folks just love to see on the tube. A bonus for a New Orleans-set show: He is an accomplished piano player, and so, of course, is Pride.
Add Lucas Black (fresh, for TV at least, and gifted with a natural-born Alabama accent so thick many viewers think he overdoes it), Zoe McLellan (a California native who has generations-deep family roots in New Orleans), CCH Pounder (who brings quality-cable cred from the likes of "Sons of Anarchy" and "The Shield" to every scene she's in) and Rob Kerkovich (not a nobody when cast, but not a Bakula, either, and a writers' delight) and the core was set.
Add frequent appearances by regular guest cast Daryl Mitchell, Weber, Keach and Walsh, and you've got even more distinctive faces for the show's writers to animate.
6. The main characters combine as real work-friends would.
Pride is "King" of the NCIS office, but the others naturally pair up for appealing interplay (a lesson learned from the mothership). Pounder's always-composed Dr. Loretta Wade has great chemistry with Kerkovich's nerdcore spaz Sebastian Wade. Black's Christopher LaSalle and McLellan's Merri Brody could be siblings.
The show's writers, Lieber said, have enjoyed finding and exploring the interpersonal chemistry shared by the cast.
"You learn really quickly where the gold is, and then you try to write to it," he said.
5. New Orleans is a character in the drama -- but a supporting character.
The star of "NCIS: New Orleans" is the pace of each weekly procedural, a revelation to anyone who came to the series without first watching at least a little of "NCIS." As the main characters race to track down clues and suspects in each week's crime, they do so in the streets of the title city, but it's the crime and crime-solving that keeps viewers coming back.
As the season advanced, the blitz of New Orleans references seen and heard in the introductory episodes and during the regular season's early hours became less of a preoccupation. Always present -- as in the only-in-NOLA decor of the office's French Quarter squad room and adjoining kitchen and courtyard (exterior on St. Ann, interior on a suburban sound stage) -- but not front-and-present.
Also gradually dialed back, to locals' great relief: Bakula's accent.
"NCIS: New Orleans" and "NCIS" are written in adjoining office-park compounds in Valencia, Calif. The writing staff for the new show, like the vast majority of its audience, isn't steeped in New Orleans lore and logistics, and has navigated a learning curve in that regard.
D'Wayne Swear, a former New Orleans NCIS agent and a West Bank native, is the show's technical consultant (the Chubbie's reference in "Crescent City" was his contribution) and aids in that task. The show's New Orleans crew regularly pitches in as well, said writing-staff members Laurie Arent and Sam Humphrey.
Both writers had limited but memorable experience in New Orleans before landing their positions at "NCIS: New Orleans." Arent's writer-producer credits include "The Client List" and "Life," Humphrey's are "Body of Proof" and "CSI:NY." Though based in the Los Angeles area, they work in New Orleans while the episodes for which they've written teleplays are filmed. Each said they return home with a new set of experiences and ideas and local details to incorporate into future stories.
"Visiting there as a writer and trying to write about that place from a non-tourist perspective, I really found myself constantly deferring to the crew," said Humphrey, adding that she listens carefully for details of "their day-to-day lives there."
"Being down there just sparks endless ideas, and the authentic stuff that you can use in your next episode," Arent added.
Lieber, who wrote the season finale's teleplay, picked up on one unique note during visits to oversee earlier episodes he'd written.
"It's harder to make light of death in New Orleans," he said. "There's something about being in New Orleans and shooting in New Orleans and being set in New Orleans -- there's a more soulful relationship with the dead than other cop shows (have).
"I'm constantly looking at scenes where we're over a dead body and we're talking and someone will put in a joke. My reaction is, 'I don't know if we can do that.'"
4. The theme song.
"Boom Boom" by Big Head Todd and the Monsters with John Lee Hooker isn't part of the New Orleans canon, but is a plausible and crackling scene-setting opening number because a blues cover band is playing it, or something very much like it, right now on Bourbon Street. It also gave the show's writing staff a go-to Twitter hash tag -- #BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM -- to signal that a new episode, and accompanying tweet-along, is starting.
3. The show is very patient with character development.
Personal details for the show's main characters trickle out. Pride's father and that back-story didn't surface until Mardi Gras. LaSalle's brother and Brody's ex-fiance didn't show up until the second half of the season, either.
"NCIS: New Orleans" was an out-of-the-gate success, winning a second-season renewal in January with "Madam Secretary" and "Scorpion" months before CBS would announce the rest of its fall plans. Though not a surprise given the show's platform and early execution, the early pickup signaled that the writing staff had embarked upon making a 200-hour movie.
That number isn't a stretch: "NCIS: Los Angeles" has passed the 140-episode mark; "NCIS," 280. Serving the weekly procedural (and longer "Baitfish" story arc) story was the main writers-room task, but the show judiciously began to introduce bits about the characters who serve the stories -- a long-term project.
"There's not a lot of downtime in the shows," Lieber said of the story pacing in "NCIS" and its spinoff. "We try as much as possible to earn the stopping (for character moments), which to me is the stuff that causes people to really invest in the show."
Added Humphrey, during a January writers-room visit a few days after the early renewal: "Jeff's desire to write character into the stories is giving us our own identity."
2. It has its own "NCIS" identity because of where it's set.
"NCIS: New Orleans" averages more location shooting days per episode than most TV dramas for a reason.
"Our original pattern was four days on the set and four days out," Lieber said. "We have leaned toward out more, so we end up more like three days on the set and five days out, because the city is so shootable, because there's so much there, and because there's so much energy on the street.
"We found ourselves wanting to be out more."
1. It's set in New Orleans.
Where locals have been typically protective, but welcoming and appreciative of the "NCIS: New Orleans" presence and the multiple benefits it brings. Original episodes of the series on WWL are usually the most-watched non-football prime-time TV hour each week in New Orleans.
"There's a huge commitment to trying to do it correctly here," Bakula said in a recent TV Guide magazine cover story (no online link). "I've lived in a lot of great cities in the United States, but this one's unique in that people are always saying to me, 'We love what you're doing here. How are you liking my city?' There's this possessiveness about it. You don't usually hear people say, 'How are you loving my Santa Monica?'"
Glasberg experience some of that from aboard a Mardi Gras float.
The production filmed its Mardi Gras episode, which aired on Fat Tuesday, before most of the writers, producers and actors had experienced a real Mardi Gras. Glasberg -- along with cast members Kerkovich, McLellan and Pounder -- rode in Orpheus, and the writer-producer returned to Los Angeles with a head-full of ideas for future episodes, as well as great memories.
"To be a part of it and think of the fact that a year ago at that very same time we were just starting," Glasberg said after his ride. "And now to see people holding up signs that say 'NCIS' on them and yelling out 'NCIS!' It was like Christmas morning for me."
Got a TV question? Contact Dave Walker at dwalker@nola.com or 504.826.3429. Read more TV coverage at NOLA.com/tv. He's @DaveWalkerTV on Twitter, and Dave Walker TV on Facebook.
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