CBS has found the young Mark Harmon for its young NCIS prequel show
TV's most famous white-haired man will now be played by a younger man with dark hair
For 400 episodes and enough seasons that the show can now legally have a gin and tonic every afternoon at around 3 p.m., CBS’ NCIS has comforted viewers with endless stories about Navy-related crimes and the Navy cops who solve them—and for most of those years, the team was led by the firm hand and salt-and-pepper locks of Mark Harmon’s implausibly named Leroy Jethro Gibbs. Harmon left the show a couple of years ago, but CBS announced earlier this year that it would be bringing back Leroy Jethro Gibbs for a prequel series called NCIS: Origins, and now we know the young(er) man who is going to fill Harmon’s old(er) shoes.
According to Deadline, Austin Stowell from George Clooney’s Catch-22 adaptation has been tapped to play the presumably dark-haired Leroy Jethro Gibbs (we keep using his full name because it is just so silly) in the new series, which will take place in 1991 as Leroy Jethro Gibbs “starts his career as a newly minted special agent at the fledgling NIS Camp Pendleton office.” There, he “forges his place on a gritty, ragtag team led by NCIS legend Mike Franks” (played by Muse Watson in the regular series). That makes it sound a bit like… NCIS, but with a hot, new young vibe for the good ol’ days of Desert Storm.
Will there be an episode where Young Leroy Jethro Gibbs goes to say Terminator 2? Will he play Sonic The Hedgehog? Will he watch a new show called Law & Order and marvel at the fact that it will run for 20 more years? Will he joke about how wild it is for any TV show to run that long, winking at the audience about how long NCIS has been going?
Speaking of, Leroy Jethro Gibbs first appeared in the 2003 JAG episode “Ice Queen,” which was a backdoor pilot for its spin-off, NCIS. JAG premiered in 1995, meaning the new show can only run for four seasons before it starts bumping up against the canonical events of JAG and only 12 seasons before it starts intersecting with “Ice Queen.” That may seem like a lot, but the average length of a TV show in the JAG/NCIS universe is around 10 seasons, so it’s not totally unthinkable.