From Severed Legs in Dumpsters to Abandoned Ghost Ships, Just How Real Is 'NCIS'?

A real-life NCIS agent mentioned paperwork wouldn't make for good tv but we'd watch Gibbs file his nails.

Mar. 25 2024, Published 6:01 p.m. ET

It's laborious to believe a time when NCIS, or certainly one of its many spinoffs, has not been on our televisions. And whilst that show used to be spun proper off of JAG, it ended up dominating the world of procedurals 2nd handiest to Law & Order. Feel free to make the noise after studying that. If one had been to check Law & Order with NCIS, one would possibly liken the latter to an overzealous theater child. It's a little bit quirky and a little bit ordinary, but you need to love its earnestness.

NCIS has been cruising into our lives for over two decades. That manner now we have skilled more than twenty years of kidnappings, torture, star-crossed fans, crime solving, and one time when a body exploded on the morgue table during an post-mortem. Goodness, what did that guy devour? Obviously Hollywood injects more than its fair proportion of glitz and glamour into the show, but surely a few of it is rooted in truth. Is NCIS a real thing? At the very least it's real cool.

Is 'NCIS' a real thing or did Hollywood make the entire thing up? Let's dive in.

As MaryAnn Cummings, NCIS communications director and retired Army colonel, instructed the United Service Organizations (USO), "It's entertainment." The model of NCIS we see on the small display screen is just the "Hollywood version," she advised the USO. Like all of us, NCIS the govt company incorporates multitudes. Some of those multitudes had been borrowed by way of Tinsel Town and some were plucked out of the ether in a writers' room.

One big difference between the show and the agency is the "struggles over jurisdiction." Ed Buice is a public affairs officer who said they at all times work with different agencies. The drama on the show that comes from different bureaus refusing to paintings together does not happen in the real world. That could be damaging to the instances they are running on. As Ed so delightfully put it, "good relationships and paperwork—a large part of the job—just aren’t entertaining."

The a part of the collection that MaryAnn identifies with the most is the concept that these individuals are your circle of relatives. This task has created a bond that few can understand, but NCIS the show has captured that fantastically.

"I think on both sides … you see teams of dedicated, hard-working people trying to do their best," she mentioned. "You’ve got a lot of individuals who work very hard to do the right thing every single day." Speaking of which, what does the precise NCIS do?

What happens in the real world of the NCIS.

As a reminder, NCIS stands for Naval Criminal Investigative Service which exists inside of the Department of the Navy, in keeping with the NCIS website. They are the "civilian federal law enforcement agency uniquely responsible for investigating felony crime, preventing terrorism and protecting secrets for the Navy and Marine Corps." Because they operate on a world scale, the NCIS is often the first federal legislation enforcement company contacted when an in another country crime occurs.

If you are keen on an other medium where reality and fiction intersect, and you miss Gibbs as much as we do, glance no further than his ebook Ghosts of Hololulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor. Actor Mark Harmon co-authored this e book with Leon Carroll Jr., the former NCIS special agent who has been the technical guide on NCIS the show since the beginning.

While talking to CBS Mornings in November 2023, Mark and Leon shared why they chose to jot down this e book. It facilities around Douglas Wada who would cross on to actually be the first NCIS agent. Mark used to be approached about writing a guide but refused to do so without Leon who instructed the outlet that his job used to be to make the show look as sensible as possible. Leon also admitted to taking part in the fine art of interrogating, which makes us wish to revisit the NCIS interrogation scenes on the show.

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