NCIS said goodbye to Rocky Carroll's Leon Vance in Season 23, when the character's death exposed corruption within the agency. Now, with Vance gone, I thought they'd replace him when the show returns to the 2026 TV schedule. So, I was shocked to learn that the team behind NCIS is in no rush to do that. However, executive producer Steven D. Binder shared why they're doing this, and it makes a lot of sense.
Binder spoke to TV Insider about Carroll's exit and the decision to hold off on rushing in another star as the new director of NCIS. He explained that rather than immediately filling the role and incorporating another character into the mix, he's more content with allowing the series to get back to stories that center more heavily on the core team:
So, when Rocky exited the show, we weren’t feeling like, ‘My gosh, we need to get a manager back in here. We need to get that supervisor character back in here.’ Unless there’s a strong reason to do it, again, we’ve been letting the stories dictate where we go with the director chair. And other than playing the loss of Vance, and that sort of has given us some things to play about, OK, what’s going to happen now? The idea that we all landed on and gravitated to is we want to address that because we have to, and then we want to get back to telling stories with our core four [Parker, Sean Murray‘s McGee, Katrina Law‘s Knight, and Wilmer Valderrama‘s Torres] and Kasie [Diona Reasonover] and Jimmy Palmer [Brian Dietzen] down in autopsy and telling the best stories we can there. And that usually doesn’t mean involving a supervisor.
I totally understand that argument, and why NCIS wants to go back to focusing on Torres and Knight's potential romance, and the new dark side we're seeing in Alden Parker. Let's not forget that Jimmy Palmer has plans to hike Mt. Kilimanjaro as well, so there's a lot that the procedural could cover in addition to crime in Season 24.
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Steven D. Binder added that the role of NCIS director wasn't even a large role in the series until Rocky Carroll came along as Vance. The fact that he kept appearing was more of a credit to him as an actor than it was the role itself. It makes me all the more curious why they killed him off in the first place, and I know Carroll thought the same thing.
Of course, I've heard many actors say that being killed off memorably is the ultimate way to honor a beloved character. I also understand the mixed feelings an actor might have about liking a consistent recurring role, rather than being killed off to serve the plot. At least Carroll can take solace in the fact that it doesn't seem his exit was to make way for someone else to replace him.
NCIS returns to CBS this fall on Tuesdays at 8:00 p.m. ET, with LL Cool J's NCIS: New York coming right after and NCIS: Origins after that. I'm excited for the new series, especially because one NCIS star is already hoping to be a part of it.
