Don McGill wrote down the shape of NCIS, a dead sailor, an autopsy, a lab, a table, then left after a falling out early in the run. Twenty-odd years on the hour still follows his blueprint, which is a compliment, and a slightly sad one.
Fi1m perspective
An hour of NCIS goes like this. A sailor or a Marine is found dead somewhere near Washington, the body goes to autopsy, the evidence goes to the lab, and at the end somebody sits across a table from Gibbs (Mark Harmon) and says more than they meant to. That shape has held for twenty-four seasons and more than 500 episodes, and Don McGill wrote it down first. He co-created the programme with Donald P. Bellisario, introduced it as two episodes of JAG, "Ice Queen" and "Meltdown", in 2003, and then wrote a couple of the first episodes proper.
The one thing we can point to as his is the lab. Bellisario wanted humour. McGill was a CSI fan who liked the lab technician Greg Sanders, and his answer was a quirkier lab character, pushed further. That is where Abby comes from, and it is the part of the formula that gives the autopsy and the evidence somewhere to be funny.
He did not stay to see any of it settle. Bellisario had given him his first job, writing on JAG; the two fell out during the first season and McGill left, by his own account because Bellisario was the boss and saw things differently. The programme has run since 23 September 2003 without him. He went to Numb3rs (2005–2010) as a writer and executive producer, joined CSI: Crime Scene Investigation in 2010, ran it as co-showrunner and then alone through its final season in 2015, and consulted on Bull (2016–2017).
What can be said about his taste, then, is what NCIS still shows. The plots are frequently absurd and the people are not, and we have more than once switched on an episode meaning to watch ten minutes and stayed for the interrogation, because Gibbs at that table is worth waiting for and the hour is built to get him there. That is McGill's structure doing its job. The honest caveat is that we cannot point to a scene and say this is his and not Bellisario's or one of the many writers who came after. His career since has been inside other people's formats, keeping CSI running rather than making it anything new, and nothing we have seen argues for a style of his own.
The one programme he built from the ground up is the one he left first, and it has outlasted CSI, which he stayed to run to the end. Somewhere in that there is a better story than most of the ones on the show, and nobody has written it yet.
Biography
Don McGill is an American television writer and producer. He was born on 18 April 1963 in New York City.
McGill wrote for JAG (1995) and co-created its spin-off NCIS (2003) with Donald P. Bellisario, for which he also wrote episodes. He contributed writing and producing credits to Numb3rs (2005) and served as executive producer on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000) for its later seasons.
