Season 23 of the world’s number one franchise features a massive milestone. NCIS will celebrate 500 episodes aired sometime in the upcoming season. The show and the wider NCIS-verse have celebrated various milestones throughout the years, including 100, 200, 250 episodes, and even 1000 overall episodes in the NCIS universe. Showrunner Steven D. Binder is already thinking of ways to mark this major achievement. “It’s not that we don’t have ideas,” he told TV Line when discussing the challenge of doing something they have done before, but differently. “It’s just, which one’s worthy of this [milestone]?” he added. Binder revisited some of the things they had done before, saying:
“The only early thought is the same thought that we had for 250, 300, 400, 1,000th, which is to do something really special and worthy of that number, and what does that look like? At various times, it’s been about going back to the pilot. At one time, it was going back to when Gibbs and Ducky first met, or having the case span the entire history of the show.”
NCIS typically does flashbacks to pivotal moments whenever these huge milestones arise. For the 200th, Gibbs (Mark Harmon) had flashbacks to his time with Mike Franks, while in the 250th, Tony’s father guest-starred with Robert Wagner playing DiNozzo Sr. The 300th also featured some flashbacks, and the 400th episode revisited Gibbs (Sean Harmon) and Ducky’s (David McCallum) first meeting in the 1980s. The franchise’s 1000th episode returned to the beginning and revisited events in the pilot episode that aired on September 23, 2003, and featured a curated celebration across traditional and social media in the days and weeks leading up to NCIS Season 21, Episode 7, “A Thousand Yards.”
‘NCIS’ Is on the Move
When the show resumes this fall, it will air on a different night as CBS shakes up its schedule. The three NCIS shows currently airing will all air on Tuesday from 8 to 11 p.m. ET. The flagship series kicks off the night at 8 p.m. with NCIS: Origins in the subsequent hour, and NCIS: Sydney later at 10 p.m. ET. Will having all the shows on the air on the same night allow for something special in celebration? Meanwhile, fans of the show can revisit one of the most iconic couples when NCIS: Tony and Ziva debuts on Paramount+ later in the year.
