An expert has explained why a popular NCIS character’s portrayal is inaccurate. NCIS is a military police procedural show focused on the Major Case Response Team, a group that investigates crimes that involve the US Navy. One of the most successful shows of all time, NCIS season 23 will return on October 14.
Even now, after NCIS’ season 22 ending aired, fans still care deeply about the show. One of the reasons why the show has managed to stay successful for so long is viewers’ connection to NCIS’ cast of characters. Despite that, it turns out that many fans don’t realize that NCIS’ portrayal of at least one of its most popular characters missed the mark.
In an interview with Rachel Foertsch for ScreenRant, Matthew Steiner spoke about NCIS’ portrayal of Abby Sciuto. Steiner worked with the New York City Police Department’s Crime Scene Unit before he retired from being a First Grade Detective. During his career, Steiner spent 20 years as a crime scene investigator, and he became the lead instructor for the Crime Scene Unit.
While speaking to Steiner, Foertsch asked about NCIS’ Abby working on all aspects of crime scene investigations. In response, Steiner explained that crime scene investigators have their specific areas of expertise and can’t do it all. Steiner also called out other characters, like Sherlock Holmes and Dexter Morgan, for being inaccurate for the same reason. Check out Steiner’s comments below:
ScreenRant: I feel like you’ve probably seen her around, but [NCIS’ Abby Sciuto] does literally everything. Sometimes she’ll be at the crime scene, but otherwise, she is in the lab, she’s doing ballistic, she’s doing the fingerprints. If something needs to get done, they call her in the middle of the night.
She’s the only one in there. They don’t have another assistant to pass things off to. Is it possible for one person to actually do that load of work?
Matt Steiner: Absolutely not, no, no way. That starts [back with] like Sherlock Holmes, the fictional character that could do everything. The Abby, the Dexter, the person that has all the answers and knows everything, is an expert in everything.
It takes a career, a lifetime just to be an expert in just one of these sub-disciplines of forensic science. Just to learn how to do something simple. It looks very simple on TV, like dusting and lifting for fingerprints, that takes thousands of hours of repetition, and thousands of fingerprints over and over to master that. And then that’s just one small part of fingerprinting, let alone chemical development, and the analysis side of putting into labs.
So, you have people that specialize in certain things. If you have someone that’s an expert in more than maybe one or two things, usually that person is full of s–t. That’s not reality.
You can’t be an anthropologist, a pathologist, a crime scene expert, a bloodstain pattern person, a shooting reconstructionist, a crime scene reconstructionist. It takes a lifetime just to be an expert in one of those things.
Like you wanted to go to school to become a doctor, just the beginning steps to become a doctor, you’re talking eight years in school, and then you got your residency, and then if you want to be a forensic pathologist, that’s years more of training and experience. And by that time, you’ve already spent most of your life just to become good in one thing, and then to be good in all these other things. No one lives that long. It’s not possible.
What This Means For NCIS
Steiner’s level of expertise makes it obvious that his remarks about NCIS’ Abby Sciuto reflect the truth. Despite how popular Abby has always been as a character, learning that her portrayal was so inaccurate could affect NCIS’ legacy.
The reason why Abby’s inaccurate portrayal matters goes beyond how fans perceive that character. After all, if Abby can be portrayed in such an inaccurate way, that could reflect on NCIS’ other characters. If NCIS stretched the truth with Abby, the show could have done the same with other characters. For fans who care about accuracy, that is upsetting to consider.
Our Take On How Inaccurate Abby Sciuto Was
If Steiner had praised the portrayal of Abby Sciuto, that would have been really nice to see. However, learning that Abby couldn’t possibly have been an expert at all aspects of crime scene investigation doesn’t bother me much for a simple reason. I recognize that storytelling forces TV shows to be economical in some ways.
For NCIS not to constantly feel repetitive, the show needs to have crimes investigated in different ways. As a result, characters need to be shown employing different areas of crime scene investigation expertise. At the same time, NCIS also wouldn’t be as entertaining if the show was constantly cutting to new experts that viewers don’t feel connected to.
In order to feature different kinds of investigation techniques and continue to showcase Abby, NCIS had to be scientifically inaccurate.
