Five hundred episodes. In scripted, live-action primetime television, that number belongs to almost nobody.
NCIS joined that list Tuesday night on CBS, airing its 500th episode, an installment titled “All Good Things,” written by showrunner Steven D. Binder himself, and the milestone is the kind that makes you stop and think about how improbable the whole thing actually is.
The company is rarefied. Gunsmoke, Lassie, Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU. Animated shows. A handful of others.
In terms of live-action primetime drama, NCIS now sits at the very top of the longevity rankings, and it got there by doing something almost no other show of its era managed to pull off, outlasting its own cast, repeatedly, and somehow getting away with it every single time.
What Is In The Episode 500?
Episode 500, “All Good Things,” picks up a storyline that has been building through Season 23, the agency is facing shutdown.
Director Vance, played by Rocky Carroll, warns the team about a worst-case scenario while the whole operation is on the ropes.
When a grown man whose Marine father Gibbs once helped comes to NCIS in desperation, the fractured team reunites and works the case off the books, without badges, without official cover, and with consequences that could cost them more than their careers.
Binder, who wrote the script, told TV Insider he wanted to go back to the beginning, “I wanted to go back to the beginning and make sure it was filled with things about our characters that longtime fans would recognize and love.”
He promised between five and ten Easter eggs scattered through the episode, background details and nods to characters spanning the show’s history, from Gibbs and Ducky and Tony DiNozzo to Abby, Kate, and Ziva.
Not all of them make physical appearances. Some are visible for only a few frames. Binder said of that approach, “In some ways less is more.”
He also told TVLine the episode would “change everything about this show in some degree,” though with CBS having already renewed NCIS for a Season 24 back in January, the shutdown storyline carries fictional stakes rather than existential ones.
The Cast Turnover Nobody Expected The Show To Survive
The more remarkable story is the one that got the show to 500 in the first place. NCIS launched in 2003 as a JAG spinoff, created by Donald Bellisario, and it struggled early.
By Season 3 it was winning its Tuesday night time slot. By its prime years, it was the most-watched scripted show on American television, sometimes by a considerable margin.
And it did it while cycling through cast members in ways that would have destroyed almost anything else.
The first test came in Season 2, when Sasha Alexander wanted out and her character Kate Todd was killed by a sniper.
The show not only survived; it discovered something. As Sean Murray, the only cast member who has been there since Season 1, put it, the shock of Kate’s death was unlike anything network television was doing at the time.
The show turned audience anxiety about character exits into a feature rather than a problem.
Then Cote de Pablo’s Ziva left in 2013. Michael Weatherly’s Tony DiNozzo in 2016. Pauley Perrette’s beloved Abby in 2018. Each exit generated the same cycle: panic, transition, adaptation, survival.
Binder described the pattern plainly to Variety, “By the time Mark left, there had already been a little bit of a proof of concept that the show might be able to survive the loss of any one cast member.”
Mark Harmon’s exit in 2021 was the biggest test of all. Gibbs had been the show’s anchor for 18 full seasons and part of a 19th.
His departure was the one fans had been dreading for years. Gary Cole came in as Supervisory Special Agent Alden Parker, and the network, Binder admitted, had doubts early.
He told Variety he urged them to stay the course, “You’re not supposed to like him. It’s a good thing. We’re gonna turn that, and then you’re gonna love him.” They did.
Today, Sean Murray as McGee is the sole surviving original cast member. Brian Dietzen’s Jimmy Palmer and Rocky Carroll’s Leon Vance date back to the early 2000s but were not original regulars. Everyone else is newer.
Wilmer Valderrama, who joined in 2016 as Nick Torres, had a moment in a recent episode where another character called him the new guy and he pushed back, “I’ve been here nine years already.”
Gary Cole and Katrina Law, who joined in Season 19, are now five seasons in. As Binder noted to Variety, that is a pretty good run on any television show.
What The Showrunner Says About The Future
Binder has been on NCIS since Season 3. He became co-showrunner in 2018 and sole showrunner in 2021. He has now overseen more of the show’s life than anyone else alive, and he has a clear-eyed view of what has kept it going.
The ensemble dynamic, the team as a kind of family, is the engine, not any single face.
“You can lose somebody as long as they’re replaced in the right way with the right person,” he told Variety, “and that family/team ensemble dynamic continues.”
His view of the show’s future is characteristically blunt. He told Variety he sees no reason NCIS would stop, his exact phrasing: other than “the utter and complete total collapse of the network broadcast business model.”
That is not nothing, given the state of broadcast television. But for now, Season 24 is confirmed, the show remains a top-10 CBS series in its 23rd year, and 3.3 trillion minutes of NCIS have been watched across broadcast, syndication, and streaming.
CBS president David Stapf framed the endurance in a single word, comfort. “You know what you’re going to get and it feels good and you love it,” he said.
Five hundred episodes in, that is still apparently enough.
NCIS airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on CBS and streams the next day on Paramount+.
