Abby Sciuto is retired: The passing of actress Pauley Perrette is mourned md20

While the characters who make up the large ensemble cast of NCIS may be beloved, that doesn’t make them the best at their jobs. Like many other popular police procedurals, the special agents at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service often embrace tactics that would never fly in a real-life scenario. Now, a professional forensic expert speaks up about one of the show’s most popular characters from the original cast to set the record straight on whether she was actually a realistic portrayal of a forensic scientist. Unfortunately for fans of the series, the answer is a resounding “no.”

NCIS’s Abby Sciuto Is Unrealistic, According to Science

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Pauley Perrette is one of the most beloved members of the original NCIS cast, playing Dr. Abby Sciuto for fifteen seasons. Abby works as a forensic scientist at the Washington headquarters of NCIS, applying her knowledge and skill in the field to solve some of the division’s most difficult cases. Over the years, she became iconic for her father-daughter relationship with Mark Harmon’s Leroy Jethro Gibbs, as well as her other heartfelt relationships with the rest of her team, particularly Sean Murray’s Tim McGee. While NCIS always portrayed Abby as being at the very top of her field, a real-life forensic scientist claims otherwise. Matthew Steiner, a former detective who worked with the New York City police department for twenty years and later served as a lead instructor for the Crime Scene Unit, recently opened up to ScreenRant about NCIS‘s portrayal of forensic science. As is often the case with experts reviewing fictionalized adaptations of their job, Steiner wasn’t totally complimentary toward Abby’s work in NCIS. During one exchange with interviewer Rachel Foertsch, Steiner revealed why there is no real-life parallel to NCIS‘s Abby Sciuto:

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.

Steiner basically lays out that Abby Sciuto couldn’t exist simply because there is no one who could be considered an expert in so many fields at once. NCIS portrays Abby as a “wonder kid” of sorts, conveniently possessing all the necessary skills she needs to help solve a case. She is a tech whiz, a chemist, a pathologist, and an anthropologist–whatever the series needs her to be in a given episode. However, the time it would take to attain so many skills would be so outrageous that no one person could ever possess them all. According to Steiner, a real-life crime scene investigative office would break up Abby’s role across several different departments, with multiple individuals lending their expertise to each given case. As fun as it may be to see Abby put her incredible intelligence to good use to solve any problem that comes her way, it simply isn’t a realistic representation of criminal investigation services.

NCIS’s Abby Makes Sense for the Show

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While the character of Abby Sciuto doesn’t track with real-life criminal investigations, her role makes perfect sense for NCIS. Real investigative teams are indeed much larger, with a large array of individuals lending their expertise to each case. For a series that can only include a limited number of characters in its main ensemble, it makes sense for NCIS to combine all of these fields with a single character who possesses mastery over them all. It is much simpler for each episode to pay a visit to Abby’s lab once, rather than multiple stations with multiple characters, each with something new to add to the case. To the show’s credit, NCIS does occasionally suggest that other experts have weighed in on a mystery, but often does so off-screen. There are frequent references to a larger team with more experts–they simply aren’t major characters in the series. This doesn’t negate Steiner’s observations, as he is still absolutely correct that no one on Earth has the expertise of Abby Sciuto. Still, Abby’s role could be considered an amalgamation of multiple different roles in a typical investigative team.

Abby is just one example of a trope found in many police procedurals and other detective shows. In his interview with ScreenRant, Steiner made reference to other characters with whom he has the same objections. Characters like Sherlock Holmes and Dexter Morgan fill this role, seemingly possessing expertise in a wide range of subjects when it would actually be impossible for any one person to have mastered so many things at once. While this may not be a realistic portrayal of detective work, these kinds of characters remain a staple of the genre. Audiences never get tired of seeing master detectives at work, as evidenced by the avalanche of successful series that utilize the exact approach that Steiner loathes. Characters like Abby Sciuto, Sherlock Holmes, Dexter Morgan, and Shawn Spencer may not be realistic, but they make for great television.

Why Did Abby Sciuto Leave NCIS?

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Despite being at the very top of her field and one of the greatest television scientists of all time, Abby Sciuto’s time on NCIS came to an end in 2018. Pauley Perrette left NCIS at the end of Season 15 and has since taken a step away from acting. In the series, Abby leaves NCIS after a terrifying encounter with a hitman hired to kill her. When her friend Clayton Reeves is killed protecting her, Abby chooses to resign from her post to start a charity in his honor. She moves to England to do so, marking the last time that Perrette’s character has made an appearance on the long-running procedural series.

Since Abby’s departure, NCIS hasn’t made an attempt to create a more realistic version of her job description. Diona Reasonover’s Kasie Hines took over for Abby after her departure, and generally fulfills all the same criticisms that Matthew Steiner had with her predecessor. Ultimately, shows like NCIS only have a limited time to bring their stories to life, which doesn’t always result in the most realistic display of real-life criminal investigations. Nevertheless, with characters as compelling as Abby Sciuto and Kasie Hines, audiences tend not to notice the series stretching the truth.