NCIS

It's NCIS. Season twenty-four. Mark Harmon left years ago, Gary Cole has been running the squad room as Alden Parker since 2021, and Michael Weatherly's Tony DiNozzo is reportedly back in the mix this year alongside Sean Murray's McGee, Wilmer Valderrama's Torres, and Katrina Law's Knight. The format is what it's been since 2003: a Navy or Marine-adjacent body turns up in a cold open, the team banters its way through forensics with Brian Dietzen's Jimmy Palmer, somebody gets interrogated in a dim room, Parker drops a dry one-liner, case closed in forty-two minutes. Rinse. CBS orders twenty more. You already know if you watch this show.

Cole is the quiet reason the thing still functions. He plays Parker as a guy who's seen everything and refuses to perform urgency about any of it, and that calm anchors a cast that could easily tip into mugging. Dietzen has quietly become the show's heart; his Palmer scenes do more character work in two minutes than most procedurals manage in a season. The craft of the format itself is underrated. Twenty-three years in, the writers' room knows exactly how to pace a cold open, land an act break before the commercial, and give you a resolution that doesn't require you to remember what happened last week. For a certain kind of viewer that reliability is the entire point.

It's the same show. The lighting is flat, the Navy Yard set has been shot from every possible angle, and the mysteries are solved by whichever piece of forensic magic the plot needs that week. Guest villains telegraph themselves by minute six. The banter has calcified into catchphrases, and the emotional beats, when they land, land because you've known these people for a decade, not because the writing earned it in the scene. Weatherly's return is a nostalgia play, and nostalgia plays have a ceiling. If you want ambition, swing, or a show that respects your attention, this isn't trying to be that and never pretended otherwise.

Love it: anyone who liked JAG, anyone who watches Blue Bloods reruns on autopilot, anyone whose parents have it on when you visit, anyone folding laundry. The CBS 8pm crowd is a real audience and this is their meat loaf. Bail: anyone who came up on prestige TV and needs serialization, moral ambiguity, or a visual language more adventurous than "medium shot, cut to close-up." If you quit The Rookie because it was too formulaic, you'll quit this in act two.

BACKGROUND TV is the honest tier. The show isn't bad, it's just not asking anything of you, and it has stopped asking anything of itself. Cole is good. Dietzen is good. The directing is competent and anonymous. The scripts hit their marks the way an assembly line hits its marks, which is a kind of craft but not the kind you lean forward for. There's no sermon here, no messaging taking the wheel; the writing isn't preaching, it's just coasting. Put it on while you cook. You won't miss anything by looking at your phone, and that is both the appeal and the ceiling.