NCIS Remembers Why History Matters

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TV SERIES REVIEWS
NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service: The Twenty-Third Season
TV-14 –

Genre: Crime, Drama, Action
Year Released: 2025–2026, 2026 DVD
Runtime: 20 episodes, approximately 14h 20m
Cast: Gary Cole, Sean Murray, Wilmer Valderrama, Katrina Law, Brian Dietzen, Diona Reasonover, Rocky Carroll
Where to Watch: available now; order your copy here: www.moviesunlimited.com or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: Twenty-three seasons into a television series, simply continuing to function would qualify as an accomplishment. NCIS: SEASON TWENTY-THREE does considerably more than that. Rather than treating its age as something to hide, the season repeatedly reaches into the show’s history, pulls old relationships and unfinished business back into the present, and uses them to remind us why these characters have survived for more than two decades.

The season begins with Alden Parker (Gary Cole) still dealing with the fallout surrounding his father’s murder, giving Cole material that immediately pushes him beyond his usual dry humor and steady leadership. Parker has become comfortable enough in the series that it’s easy to forget how difficult replacing Gibbs could have been. Still, Season 23 continues proving that NCIS didn’t need another version of the same character. Parker works because Cole made him fundamentally different while still giving the team someone who can hold everything together.

That opening storyline also establishes one of the season’s biggest strengths. The cases remain important, but they’re increasingly used to pressure characters rather than simply provide another weekly mystery. Parker’s anger, his complicated family history, and the choices he makes while pursuing answers give the first episodes an emotional urgency that immediately separates them from routine procedural television.

Sean Murray remains one of the show’s most valuable constants as Timothy McGee. By now, McGee has lived through enough versions of NCIS that he practically represents its institutional memory, yet the writers haven’t reduced him to the guy who remembers how Gibbs used to do things. An episode built around his Deep Six novels gives Murray a particularly entertaining showcase, turning something that’s often been treated as a recurring joke into the basis for a legitimate case.

McGee’s longevity also allows the series to make callbacks without stopping everything to explain why they matter. When Season 23 revisits older investigations or characters, his presence naturally connects the versions of NCIs. That’s considerably more effective than dropping references into dialogue simply because longtime viewers will recognize them.

Wilmer Valderrama gets some of the season’s most anticipated material when Ellie Bishop returns. Emily Wickersham’s appearance isn’t treated like a five-minute stunt designed to generate headlines, either. The reunion forces Torres to confront a relationship that ended without anything resembling proper closure, and their history gives the episode an emotional foundation a random returning guest star never could.

There’s obviously an element of fan service, but it is the kind I don’t mind. After 500 episodes, NCIS has earned the ability to revisit people and relationships that mattered, especially when the return actually changes how we understand the characters still on the show. Season 23 generally knows the difference between using history and simply pointing at it.

The same applies when stories reach even further back. “Now and Then” reopens a case originally investigated during the Gibbs and Franks era, allowing the current team to work through something that began long before several of them arrived. It gives the episode an almost archaeological quality, with today’s agents uncovering decisions made by people who helped build the version of NCIS they inherited.

That sense of legacy becomes especially important as the season approaches the series’ 500th episode. Reaching 500 episodes is almost absurd in modern television, and NCIS could have celebrated by assembling returning characters for a comfortable victory lap. Instead, “All Good Things” takes the milestone seriously and uses the show’s history to create genuine stakes for the agency itself.

Without getting into what happens, it’s easily the centerpiece of Season 23. The episode understands that commemorating 500 episodes shouldn’t mean spending 43 minutes congratulating yourself. It looks at what NCIS means to the people who have given years of their lives to it, what remains after people leave, and whether an institution can survive changes that once would’ve seemed impossible.

The emotional impact works because the season has already spent so much time thinking about history. Characters from the past, old investigations, and family legacies aren’t random nostalgic detours. They gradually become part of a larger examination of what gets carried forward when people inevitably move on.

Katrina Law also gets stronger material as Jessica Knight. Her opportunities outside the standard team configuration keep expanding, including work tied to NCIS Elite, and Law handles the increased responsibility well. Knight has reached the point where she feels capable of carrying significant portions of an episode rather than merely functioning as one piece of the investigative group.

One of the better things Season 23 does with Knight is let professional ambition exist without automatically framing it as betrayal. Long-running ensemble shows often create drama by pretending any character considering another opportunity must be abandoning everyone they care about. Here, the tension comes more from what advancement actually means when your professional identity has become intertwined with a particular team.

Brian Dietzen continues quietly doing some of the show’s best character work as Jimmy Palmer. Jimmy has changed tremendously from the nervous assistant introduced so many years ago, and Dietzen doesn’t need episodes completely centered on him to remind us of that growth. His interactions with the team now carry the confidence of someone who’s survived enormous personal and professional changes without losing the empathy that originally defined him.

Diona Reasonover’s Kasie Hines similarly benefits when the show gets her outside the laboratory. “Reboot” is a particularly good example, stripping away many of the team’s usual resources and forcing Kasie into a much more dangerous situation than she’s accustomed to handling. The episode changes the normal power balance without suddenly pretending she’s an action hero.

“Reboot” also brings LL Cool J’s Sam Hanna back into the larger NCIS world, another return that could’ve felt like franchise bookkeeping but fits naturally. One advantage of the franchise’s longevity is that characters can move between its different corners without requiring a giant crossover event every time. Sam’s presence feels like someone from the extended family stopping by rather than the network demanding everyone notice a guest appearance.

Not every attempt to modernize the weekly cases works equally well. The season occasionally reaches for topical technology or elaborate conspiracy mechanics when the characters would have been enough, including a storyline involving an experimental AI chatbot. Those ideas aren’t disastrous, but NCIS rarely shines when it tries too hard to prove how current it can be.

There’s also a tendency for some investigations to pile twist upon twist onto premises that would’ve worked perfectly well with fewer moving parts. Twenty-three seasons of solving crimes understandably creates pressure to find variations on familiar situations, but complexity isn’t automatically originality. A few episodes could’ve benefited from trusting the basic mystery and the cast rather than adding another reveal.

The broader serialized storytelling has a similar issue occasionally. Season 23 makes several major changes and introduces consequences that affect more than a single week, which I appreciate. Still, some of those developments arrive so quickly that the following episode has to do a lot of emotional catching up. The individual moments work; I just sometimes wanted the aftermath to receive as much attention as the event itself.

What keeps those criticisms relatively minor is the consistency across the 20 episodes. There isn’t a huge stretch that feels disposable, and even the weaker cases usually contain a worthwhile character pairing, callback, or smaller moment. That’s impressive for any network procedural, much less one entering its twenty-third year.

The episode ratings tell a similar story. Most of the season clusters comfortably in the upper sevens and low eights, while the 500th episode stands noticeably above the rest. It’s rare for a show this old to produce a milestone episode that viewers respond to as something more than a nostalgia exercise.

Gary Cole deserves particular credit for how comfortably Parker now sits at the center of all this history. Gibbs remains inseparable from NCIS as a whole, and Season 23 certainly doesn’t pretend otherwise. Still, the show no longer feels like it’s waiting for Mark Harmon to return and make everything legitimate again.

That doesn’t mean the past disappears. In fact, Season 23 may reference the show’s history more than most recent seasons, but there’s a difference between honoring what came before and living inside it. The best episodes understand that an old character or case should matter because of what it does to the current team.

The supporting cast benefits from that philosophy, too. Rocky Carroll’s Leon Vance remains enormously important to the season, and Carroll brings the authority you’d expect after nearly two decades with the character. His relationship with the agency carries a weight newer characters couldn’t replicate because viewers have watched that commitment develop for years.

That accumulated history is something very few television shows can access. A character making a difficult decision in Season 23 isn’t only informed by what happened last week. Sometimes we’re watching the result of relationships and choices that began hundreds of episodes earlier.

The upcoming DVD set also reinforces just how much television NCIS continues producing. Paramount’s five-disc Season 23 release contains all 20 episodes and roughly 860 minutes of material, a substantial package at a time when physical releases of current television series are becoming increasingly easy to take for granted.

A 4/5 feels right because this isn’t merely a good season considering how old the show is. That qualifier actually sells it short. Season 23 is consistently entertaining television that understands its characters, takes some meaningful risks with its long-established world, and finds ways to use more than two decades of history without turning every episode into a reunion special.

There are weaker cases, a few attempts at topical storytelling that don’t land as cleanly as intended, and moments where major developments deserve more room afterward. None of that changes how remarkably stable the season feels overall. NCIS has survived cast departures, changing leads, multiple spinoffs, and an entirely different television landscape than the one it entered in 2003.

Season 23 succeeds because it isn’t trying to become the show it was 15 years ago. It knows that version is gone, just as several versions of this team have come and gone before it. What remains is a series increasingly interested in the people, relationships, and history accumulated along the way, and the 500th episode makes that point clearer than anything else this year.

After 20 episodes, I came away less impressed that NCIS is still on television than by how much reason it continues giving viewers to stay with it. Twenty-three seasons should have turned this into pure routine years ago. Somehow, this team is still finding ways to make the history matter.

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