NCIS Season 22 wrapped up earlier this month on the 2025 TV schedule, with the finale delivering a devastating moment for Gary Cole’s Alden Parker in its final moments. Now we wait until Season 23 premieres as part of CBS’ 2025-2026 fall TV lineup, but some of you may find yourself thinking back to when Cole took over from Mark Harmon in NCIS Season 19’s early episodes. The Parker actor reflected on this time of transition with me recently and explained why he thought his character got a “really good entrance.”
After Cole discussed the Season 22 finale’s ending twist and how he expects this will result in Season 23 looking very different for Parker, I asked him what he thought was the biggest way his character had changed since we first met him in the episode “Nearly Departed.” The Office Space alum started off by telling me:
I always liked the way he was introduced. I thought that was a really good entrance for a character. It made sense. To come into an environment of a show that’s been on that long and your lead character is exiting… But they handled that well. It wasn’t like Gibbs left and then this new guy shows up, knocks on the door and goes, ‘Hi, I’m the new guy!’ He was involved with them, but he wasn’t familiar with them. And over time I became more familiar with the team, and I realized that he was nothing like Gibbs.
Alden Parker came onto the NCIS scene as an FBI agent whom Harmon’s Leroy Jethro Gibbs crossed paths with while looking into Paul LaMere, the man who blew up Gibbs’ boat while he was on it. Long story short, Gibbs, Parker and the rest of the main NCIS characters accumulated enough evidence to arrest LaMere’s boss, though Parker was fired from the FBI for not bringing Gibbs in like he was ordered to do. After Gibbs decided to stay in Naktok Bay, Alaska, Parker joined NCIS to take over his position as team leader.
So like Gary Cole laid out, introducing Parker at the same time as Harmon’s time on the show was winding down allowed for a smoother transition vs. if he’d come in immediately after Harmon’s last appearance. It also quickly became clear that Parker’s leadership style was very much not like Gibbs’, with Cole saying:
He wasn’t a leader in the sense that he thought of himself as a leader. That was a job description. But on some level, he was just another guy in the room except when some authority was required. But he used that sparingly, I thought, and the way the writers did that.
Cole then gave me a specific example from one of his earliest NCIS episodes about how Alden Parker acknowledged that Gibbs not being around anymore was weird for everyone, including himself. As the actor laid out:
I think there was one episode, maybe it was two episodes after Mark left, it was kind of a regular routine scene in the squad room where we’re breaking down who the bad guy is, what I’m gonna do, where we’re gonna go. And in the middle of it, Parker just says, ‘Look, I know this is weird. I know you had somebody here for a long time. I feel weird too,’ and basically just acknowledge the fact that yes, this is a different situation than we’re used to, but we all have to live with it.
Hey, address the elephant in the room while you can, right? Gary Cole certainly welcomed this, wrapping up this portion of our interview by saying:
And I appreciated that. I thought it was kind of funny, but it was real too because it was stating what actually took place. As time went by, we meshed as a team. Every actor I worked with, I found something that I could hook into with them, and then hopefully they did with me as well.
Clearly things have been going well for Gary Cole if he’s heading into his fifth season on NCIS. But while Cole’s still having a good time on the CBS show, Alden Parker is very much not in a good place right now due to the aforementioned tragedy. Additionally, the mystery of the little girl from his past named Lily, which was introduced in the Season 21 finale, still hasn’t been fully resolved.
So Parker definitely has a lot coming up for him in NCIS Season 23, and we’ll keep you apprised of what’s happening with him and the rest of the main cast when the next batch of episodes kicks off. Meanwhile, those of you who are looking for a Leroy Jethro Gibbs would be wise to watch Austin Stowell’s younger version of the character in NCIS: Origins, which is returning for Season 2.
