‘NCIS: Sydney’ Showrunner Morgan O’Neill Reveals an Easter Egg That Will Thrill Fans of the Original Series

NCIS: Sydney heads Down Under for the first-ever international franchise of the hit naval investigative drama, which is shot against the beauty of Sydney Harbour, and as a result of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes here in the U.S. will now premiere on CBS instead of staying exclusive to Australia, which was the original plan.

Prior to its premiere here in the U.S., Parade caught up with creator/showrunner Morgan O’Neill for a chat about how NCIS: Sydney will stand out from the other four series in the franchise, and what will be familiar to fans.

“I think between the combination of the location, the exoticism of a place like Australia, the tempo of the way we work and a sense of larrikinism [impertinent and disrespectful behaviour], you’re going to get a very different flavor of NCIS: Sydney and hopefully one that is additive rather than duplicative,” he says.

The story starts at the very beginning of the formation of an NCIS office in Australia when members of America’s NCIS agents’ afloat team and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) combine to solve the death of an American seaman which happened on a U.S. nuclear submarine during an AUKUS ceremony in Sydney Harbour.

“I’m pretty excited by what we’ve delivered on,” O’Neill continues. “I think fans of the show will recognize a lot of the shared DNA that NCIS: Sydney has with the other four iterations, that’s for sure. But I think they’ll also see a real twist in what they’re used to. The first international version of the show, the first show set in the Southern Hemisphere, the first blended family, the first time we’ve seen Americans and Australians working together. I think there’s a lot of firsts that hopefully the core audience for NCIS will really lap up.”

The series stars Olivia Swann as NCIS Special Agent Captain Michelle Mackey, Todd Lasance as AFP Liaison Officer Sergeant Jim ‘JD’ Dempsey, Mavournee Hazel as Forensic Pathologist “Bluebird ‘Blue’ Gleeson, William McInnes as Forensic Pathologist Dr. Roy Penrose, Tuuli Narkle as AFP Liaison Officer Constable Evie Cooper, and Sean Sagar as Special Agent DeShawn Jackson.

In addition to sharing his thoughts on what will be familiar and what will be new, O’Neill reveals a big Easter egg from episode two that ties in with the very first episode of NCIS, which took place aboard Air Force One.

Read on for what the Aussie showrunner had to say about the making of the latest chapter of NCIS:

Former NCIS showrunners Shane Brennan and Don Bellisario are sometimes in Australia. Did you want to chat with them?

We didn’t, although I know that Don does have a presence in Australia, and obviously Shane does, too. Shane’s currently the president of our Writer’s Guild. Obviously, they both have deep roots in the show. But, no, when the opportunity first arose, my first instinct was to go back and watch every episode of the show I could possibly watch to make sure that I understood the show in its foundational form.

Watching it, it became very clear that while each of the iterations of the show is very different one to the other, they all have this shared DNA, which is that you really love to spend an hour with these characters. They feel like family to one another and then hopefully as you watch, they feel like family to you.

You feel like it’s a kind of comfort food in a time when if you open the newspaper or click online there’s a lot of really dark stuff going on in the world. I think in some ways shows like NCIS are a bit of an antidote to that. And so, I felt like that’s a shared DNA that all those iterations of the show have that we also tried to replicate.

I also understood if you take a sample of those four existing franchises [NCIS, NCIS: New Orleans, NCIS: Los Angeles, NCIS: Hawai’i] you can see that the makers were never interested in replicating the show. They didn’t want to make the same show twice. Los Angeles is incredibly different to the original show, and New Orleans to that and Hawai’i to that again.

And so, I felt really confident that the pathway to success in terms of expanding the universe of NCIS was not to try and make the same show again, but to really feel empowered to make an authentic show that felt like it was from somewhere else. And in this case somewhere else is a long way from everywhere else. That’s a good thing for us. That gives us a real point of difference.

All the shows are different. They obviously have NCIS in common. But they also have something else in common. What do you think it is that they have in common that you want to include in NCIS: Sydney?

There’s a few things. They all have fun in common, and a kind of twinkle in the eye. There’s a lot of police procedurals on telly right now that you can watch and they’re great shows, but they’re really focused on peeling back the human psyche and looking at the dark insides of what we are and what makes us tick. And that’s all great, but that’s not really NCIS. NCIS does it with a twinkle, with a little cheeky wink. I think that’s really distinctive to NCIS. And, interestingly, that’s really distinctive to Australians. That’s kind of how we are, certainly how we’re perceived internationally. From that perspective I think that’s something that all the NCIS shows share in common.

Another thing is that watching the show you realize that the organization of NCIS is the minnow in the 17 U.S. military intelligence acronyms. There are 17 of them to my knowledge. You have NSA, CIA and the FBI up one end with hundreds of thousands of employees. And then all the way down at the other end, number 17 of 17 is NCIS, which has 1,000 agents worldwide. It’s the smallest, it’s the least resourced, it’s the least known of all these organizations, which makes it the scrappiest. Real world and on the show, they constantly have to do more with less. They’re underdogs. You could be describing Australia; that’s how Australia’s viewed.

So, from that perspective NCIS in Sydney is a perfect fit. When you consider that we have this enormous harbor, the world’s largest harbor, we live on the world’s largest island in this really contested patch of water that is the Indo-Pacific. I’m shocked that we haven’t already made this show.

To me, the element that they all have in common is that the teams come to be families and they’re families that bicker and they tease each other. It’s that camaraderie that we tune in for every week.

That’s exactly right. I was describing it to someone the other day as in some ways it’s a family drama crossed with a workplace comedy. That I think is such a special tone the show has, and we tried really hard to make sure that we played within the world of that special tone.

We have the advantage, obviously, of the family coming together for the very first time on day one. What the other iterations have always done is drop the audience into an office that was already completely functional with already established relationships that were well advanced, and they basically played off of that. Whereas we have the advantage of watching them walk into the office on day one not having known each other, having to build those bonds and having to test them and having to try and create a sense of family on the run, at speed, while trying to solve a crime in 42 minutes. That’s just inherently fun.

Then when you consider that the two parts of this organization are coming together with two very different cultural lenses, there’s the opportunity for so much of this culture clash coming together and misunderstanding and cross communication and miscommunication. We leaned into it because it seems a very obvious and enjoyable place to kick the show off from.

When you sit down and you have this blank page in front of you and you have to create the show, how do you decide on the characters? Yes, there has to be somebody who leads the team, there has to be somebody who does the technical stuff and there has to be somebody who does the autopsies. But how do you flesh them out and give them personalities?

Look, you’re absolutely right. Any audience of this show knows that there are particular roles to be filled. There has to be someone who leads the team, there has to be someone who’s the 2IC [2IC means second in command], there has to be someone who has the medical skills to autopsy a body and work out cause of death, and there has to be someone who has the forensic skills to work out the nitty gritty of the crime. Each of the iterations of the NCIS franchise has those characters. The key is not to simply ape those characters in a new show. That would have been death.

Look at the character of Abby (Pauley Perrette), for instance. I think Abby is one of the iconic characters of the 21st century on television. She’s beloved and she’s universally recognized. There’s no way you could create Abby version 2.0. You’d be trying to push s–t up hill, basically. She’s already claimed that space. So, from that perspective, when it came time to create the character of Bluebird Gleeson, I wanted to have a nod to Abby in a funny way, but I also wanted to go as far from that as possible. In the character of Blue, for instance, she’s got a massive imposter syndrome going on. She’s too young, she’s ill qualified, she doesn’t feel like she belongs playing with the adults. She’s socially awkward and a little anxious.

What she shares in common with Abby is that she’s tremendously good at her job. And she’s naturally gifted in the world in which she’s chosen to exist. I guess in short, the idea is to look at the archetypes that the show requires and then to find a new spin on them, so it doesn’t feel like we’re just treading water.

Similarly, with Captain Michelle Mackey, who runs the outfit. She’s a former Marine Corps chopper pilot; she’s a maverick. She’s really hard to work with. She’s shuttled around the world of NCIS staying in port just long enough to piss people off before she’s moved on again. She’s a tricky customer to play with but her maverick instincts are often the reason that the case gets solved. She’s got a little bit of Gibbs in her if you look at her from that perspective. A little bit of Gibbs, but we’re not trying to create Gibbs 2.0.

In the character of Michelle Mackey, we’ve got a really new, fresh, interesting female head who bucks the trend of what happens a lot on television, which is to create female characters who are warm and motherly and accessible and approachable. All of which are great, but I was more interested in creating a character who was forged on the battlefield a little bit and who you really have to work to open up. When you do, it’s really satisfying.

We’ve tried to create characters who are interesting, who have contour and angle and who don’t feel like cookie cutter characters that we’d seen before on TV. We’re playing with the archetypes and then trying to work against them as much as you can.

We talked about how it’s similar to the other shows. What makes it uniquely NCIS: Sydney? Besides the harbor, which adds so much with its beauty.

In addition to the harbor and the fact that we’re 9,000 miles from Los Angeles and the water goes down our sinks the other way around and summer is winter and winter is summer, apart from all that location stuff … what I love doing when I travel is I love sitting in a coffee shop and just watching the tempo of the world around me to try and see how that tempo differs to what I’m familiar with. You can see it in the franchises that exist already. L.A. is kind of fast and flashy and has a really high tempo. New Orleans has this laid back, jazz infused, Big Easy low, sultry walk through life. The tempo of those two worlds is very, very different one to the other.

I think what makes Sydney different is that it has its own rhythm, it has its own tempo. We have a word, larrikinism, which I naively thought was an international word but apparently, it’s not very well known internationally. A larrikin is someone who is naturally mischievous and understatedly funny. Australians have a sense of larrikinism.

The Australian larrikin was introduced to the world by Crocodile Dundee all those years ago, where it’s a laconic, laid back, understated sense of humor. The show has that, I think, and I think that should feel distinctively Australian.

I don’t think you’re going to get that sense of what JD brings to the show, for instance. He never undermines Mackey as the boss, but he’s constantly keeping her honest just with a comment here or there to make sure that the Australian way, which is quite different to a lot of other countries… We don’t do very well with hierarchies in Australia. We have a more egalitarian sense of how things like offices should run.

When Mackey comes in, a former Marine Corps captain and NCIS special agent, she has a sense of what authority should look like. We, as Australians, have a little difficulty playing that game. I think you’ll find a flattening of the hierarchies is a very distinctive Australian thing so anyone can speak their minds. That’s also fun.

NCIS: LA had Deeks (Eric Christian Olsen) as an LAPD officer assigned to NCIS, but the Sydney team is made up of NCIS and Australian Federal Police, so that’s an aspect, also, that is unique to the show, that they’re combined.

Hugely. I think the Australian Federal Police are our equivalent of the FBI. When NCIS operates in Australia, it operates under the authority of organizations like the AFP. So, that’s a brand-new situation for NCIS, but also it’s a brand new situation for the officers of the AFP. They effectively get seconded to a foreign law enforcement organization and everything that goes with that. It’s new both for the show, but also for those Australian law enforcement officers who find themselves investigating U.S. naval crimes for the first time. So, there’s a lot of firsts.

One episode has an extremely venomous snake in it. Will we see a lot of dangerous animals?

Look, it’s Australia so you can only go so far before you bump into a dangerous animal. It’s the truth. We have a reputation internationally as being this place where everything can kill you. In one sense, that’s true. In another sense, it’s just the version of Australia that the world sees. But we do have 20 of the world’s 25 most dangerous snakes in this country and 80 percent of the world’s most venomous creatures.

I was talking to a friend from Darwin the other day, which is where a lot of Marines are based, which is in the very top end of Australia. There are 180,000 people up there, including 5,000 Marines. But 200,000 saltwater crocodiles. And so, you’ve got a situation where the salties outnumber the humans, which is pretty indicative of the country that we live in.

We meet an Inland Taipan in episode two, which for those viewers who are into Easter eggs for a show like this if you remember back to the very first episode of the very first iteration of NCIS, the toxin that was on the collar of the shirt that was worn by the Naval officer aboard Air Force One, the toxin that was impregnated at the dry cleaners was Inland Taipan venom. We thought we’d give a big nod back to the very original show some 20 years ago and include the Inland Taipan, which only exists in Australia. We figured they were future nodding to us and we would nod in retrospect back to them.

What if we love NCIS: Sydney, are we going to get to see season 2? Or because the strike is over, is it going back to the original plan to be exclusive to Australia?

I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that you’ll be seeing more of us. Obviously, we haven’t announced season 2 yet, but should that happen, we’re geared up and ready to go. As I was saying to someone the other day, NCIS isn’t really in the habit of making one-off series. This is a universe that likes to expand and keep expanding. Hopefully, if you enjoy the show as much as I hope you will, we’ll get the opportunity to do it again and to keep telling you stories from the great southern land.