The actors behind the beloved TV twosome, Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo, join series creator John McNamara in breaking down their new spinoff.
What do you get when you mix a romantic comedy with an espionage thriller, a road movie, a police procedural, and a family drama? Michael Weatherly, Cote de Pablo, and John McNamara can tell you all about it.
The stars and creator of NCIS: Tony & Ziva are gearing up to welcome fans into the latest and boldest installment in the expansive NCIS universe (and back into the orbit of its fan-favorite couple). Days ahead of the globe-trotting new series’ premiere, Entertainment Weekly spoke with Tony & Ziva‘s creator (McNamara) and stars (Weatherly and de Pablo), about the look, feel, past, and future of the franchise’s sixth spinoff.
“We went fully into the deep end of the pool. We didn’t linger in the shallow, superficial part of it. We just jumped right in,” de Pablo says, reflecting on restarting the Tiva motor nearly a decade after their characters shared their final scene in NCIS. Weatherly says a spinoff like this had to go deep; had it been “a money grab – stick the four letters on the front of a city and let’s go find some crimes,” he and de Pablo simply wouldn’t have signed on.
Weatherly knew that the NCIS “imprimatur was going to guarantee some level of interest and success, but Cote and I both realized a long time ago that the kind of emotional connection that a lot of people get watching the show is more than just a kind of procedural thing. They’re very invested in these characters.”
Weatherly and de Pablo originated the suavely goofy senior NCIS agent Tony DiNozzo and the fierce former Israeli spy in 2003 and 2005, respectively. Given Tony and Ziva first flirted with becoming the supercouple fans have dubbed “Tiva” a mere eight episodes into their first shared season, that means NCIS: Tony & Ziva had two decades of lore to contend with.
They both recalled the spinoff originating with a raucous, hours-long dinner (“I don’t know how many bottles of wine that was,” Weatherly jokes) with Emmy-winning TV director Michelle MacLaren, who helmed a 2012 episode of NCIS. “Remember Cote? We got into it. Like, ‘Maybe there’s been drug addiction, what about this, and that,'” Weatherly says to de Pablo.
The Chilean-American actress remembers that at first, everything was on the table. But both she and Weatherly were crystal clear about one thing: They wanted to “get into it in a different way” than NCIS got into it. “We didn’t want it to live in the procedural world, right? We wanted to sort of detach ourselves from the agency, [and] we wanted the characters to go back to Europe. They had to somehow reinvent themselves.”
With a basic template of what they would and wouldn’t want a spinoff based around Tony and Ziva to look like, and the critical intuitive understanding of what Tiva diehards would and wouldn’t want to see, de Pablo remembers she and Weatherly having to wait years “for the perfect storm, and for the stars to align.”
“When I hired the writers, to all get on the same page I said, ‘Everybody has to watch North by Northwest. See it 10 times,'” McNamara says. “Because that set a high watermark for the series, tonally.” But on that subject, McNamara was insistent that he didn’t have his work cut out for him, because the original cast and crew of NCIS had laid such solid foundations.
“I didn’t really invent this tone, especially with respect to the the Tony and Ziva arc. It had a lot of humor, had a lot of romance, had a lot of emotion, would occasionally veer into espionage, in addition to crime,” the creator of series like The Magicians and Aquarius says. But still, NCIS: Tony & Ziva is without a doubt the most distinct entity in the NCIS franchise thus far, straddling a “fine line between a techno thriller and workplace comedy,” as Tony puts it in the first episode.
NCIS: Tony & Ziva picks up with the couple in Paris, a decade after de Pablo’s final episode of NCIS, season 17’s “In The Wind.” In the closing minutes of that episode, Ziva bids an emotional adieu to NCIS anchor star Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon) and boards a plane to the French capitol to reunite with Tony and the daughter she’d kept secret from him for years, Tali.
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For years, fans have wondered what became of Tiva. Did they get back together? Are they raising Tali as platonic co-parents? Or has something torn them apart again? Tony & Ziva continues to dangle the will-they-won’t-they carrot, but de Pablo teases that fans might be alright reading into a shocking visual from the pilot’s opening sequence, which suggests a massive, positive development in the Tiva romance.
“It was critical that the fans got a little bit of the Tony and Ziva that they remembered, and more than that, that there was a romantic payoff that they never got in the mothership,” she says. Weatherly thinks the biggest departure from the spinoff is that Tony & Ziva “feels much more cinematic… In the editing and the way the scenes and the beats play out. It’s a shift from how the other shows cut and play.”
Weatherly credits that to McNamara, who developed the attribute that makes Tony & Ziva so supremely watchable. When the retired NCIS agents are framed for a grievous financial crime, they’re forced to elude Interpol by hopping from one dazzling European metropole to another, a tour the production also undertook.
McNamara in turn throws the credit back on Weatherly and de Pablo. “We owe Michael and Cote a lot,” he says. “They both have enough confidence that they have a kind of a light touch” during what he describes as the “very deliberative” development process.
It helps that Weatherly and McNamara have known each other for more than three decades. McNamara tested the actor for a role on a 1994 series he was producing called Profit, and though Weatherly didn’t get the part, the actor says he got something better, as McNamara “became a kind of mentor to me in the ’90s.”
De Pablo also praises McNamara for having “built a really beautiful world,” one that was “incredibly ambitious in being able to explain the past, explore the romance, and delve into these characters’ psychologies.” But again, Weatherly and de Pablo are in lockstep about who truly deserves credit for summoning NCIS: Tony & Ziva into the world. In Weatherly’s words, “The fans are the reason that this show exists.”
