By India McCarty
Not many people know NCIS is actually a spin-off of popular series JAG — and that’s just how creator Donald P. Bellisario likes it.
“It’s not a spin-off,” Bellisario told the Television Academy Foundation, explaining his reasoning was that the shows had different goals.
He shared, “JAG is an older audience. This is going to be a hipper show for a younger audience, and that’s what you want. You tie it to JAG, and the young people are gonna go, ‘It’s just another version of JAG,’ and they’re not going to watch it.”
In a recent oral history of NCIS for The Hollywood Reporter, Bellisario spoke further about how he turned JAG into NCIS, sharing, “I took two JAG episodes and worked NCIS into that. JAG was the springboard for it.”
Related: Wait … Is JAG Getting a Reboot?
However, there were some kinks with how, exactly, NCIS would fit into the TV universe of JAG.
“The show was originally pitched as LAW & ORDER in the Navy,” Mark Horowitz, JAG director and NCIS executive producer, told THR. “First, there’d be some crime, and the NCIS agents would investigate it — the cops of the Navy — and then the JAG people would come in and try the case. Don played with that idea for a little while, and then he just said, ‘We’re not going to do that. It’s going to be two completely separate shows.’”
Nina Tassler, former CBS Entertainment president, shared, “The show really was so strong out of the gate. You had incredible chemistry between the cast, and there was a tone and a sensibility to NCIS that other procedurals couldn’t quite hit.”
NCIS would go on to be massively popular, spawning several spin-offs of its own, but it wasn’t always a given that the series would be a hit. In fact, the show has the USA Network to thank for its long-running success.
“At the end of their third seasons, both JAG and NCIS were sold to USA Network, where they started running them 24 hours a day,” Horowitz explained. “That’s when the network ratings went up, and we moved up to this No. 1 position.”
Reflecting on its popularity, Horowitz said, “I sometimes fondly refer to NCIS as chocolate cake. Everybody knows what chocolate cake tastes like, but you still want the chocolate cake.”
From its start as a spin-off to cable networks helping build a fanbase, NCIS has had a long and interesting journey to the top of the ratings charts.
Read Next: A New NCIS Series Is on the Way, But Will Fans Like It?
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