Next to Mark Harmon, Sean Murray is the actor I most associate with NCIS. He’s been playing Timothy McGee on the show for nearly the entirety of its run, and in 2024, he became the most-featured actor of all time in the NCIS franchise, surpassing the late David McCallum. However, you’ll notice I said “nearly the entirety.” There was a time when McGee wasn’t part of NCIS, and I’m shook to find out why Murray was added to the series in those early Season 1 days.
Former NCIS showrunner Frank Cardea and current showrunner Steven Binder visited Partners & Probies to talk with hosts Brian Dietzen and Diona Reasonover, who respectively play Jimmy Palmer and Kasie Hines on the series, about their experiences working on CBS’s popular procedural. One of the things Cardea talked about from his tenure was about the script issue he and his team ran into on Season 1’s “Sub Rosa” that prompted Timothy McGee’s creation. He started off saying:
We were doing this episode that we had three days to write, and it was in those days the core group in the squad room was Gibbs, DiNozzo and Sasha Alexander’s Kate. And they were going to go investigate Norfolk to investigate a murder on a submarine. The submarine had already left and gone to sea. So Kate and Gibbs were going to be flown out to the submarine and poor DiNozzo was stuck. He had no one to talk to.
When NCIS began, Mark Harmon’s Leroy Jethro Gibbs, Michael Weatherly’s Tony DiNozzo, Pauley Perrette’s Abby Sciuto and David McCallum’s Donald “Ducky” Mallard had already been introduced in the JAG episodes “Ice Queen” and “Meltdown,” which functioned as NCIS’s backdoor pilot. Sasha Alexander subsequently debuted in “Yankee White,” the first official NCIS episode, and these five comprised the main cast that first season. But just six episodes later, Tony was placed in a situation where he didn’t have Gibbs or Kate to bounce off of, and you can’t just have Tony chattering to no one. Frank Cardea continued:
Article continues belowWe said, ‘Well, we can't have Michael [Weatherly] talking to himself.’… But we came up with the idea of we found out what a probie was. A probie is somebody who's brand new, and we said, ‘What if there's a probie who's assigned to the NCIS office at Norfolk, and he has to get assigned to this group. And Sean Murray was cast and the rest is history.
As someone who’s been watching NCIS for almost 20 years, learning that Timothy McGee was created simply because Tony ended someone to talk to is wild. After heating Frank Cardea’s comments, I went back and watch snippets of “Sun Rosa” with my Paramount+ subscription, and it was weird hearing McGee call Tony “sir” and being so deferential knowing how they would go on to have a more comical relationship. Sean Murray returned for seven more episodes in NCIS Season 1, then was promoted to series regular in Season 2.
Let’s be glad Tony was left behind on that submarine, as it resulted in one of NCIS’s most important characters being introduced, and Sean Murray is now the top-billed actor in the opening credits. If it was up to me, we’d see McGee become the new NCIS director following Leon Vance’s death, but it may be a while until we learn who’s getting that job. For now, continuing following along with the character and his teammates Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on CBS.
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