The NCIS franchise expands tonight (September 20) with the latest installment and fourth series under the NCIS banner titled NCIS: Hawai’i. Beyond the sunny setting, this one is already different in that the leader of the series this time is a woman, Jane Tennant, as played by Vanessa Lachey.
At a recent virtual press tour panel discussing NCIS: Hawai’i, Executive Producers Jan Nash and Christopher Silber spoke a bit about what went into creating the series, including landing Lachey for the lead role.
See photos, a description, and a list of guest stars from the NCIS: Hawai’i series premiere here!
“It seems like a long time ago when we started talking about the idea of developing a new version of this franchise set in Hawai’i,” Nash recalled. “When we did start talking about it, what we wanted to do was figure out how we could make i t feel different than the other three very successful series that have preceded us. We get no points for landing on the obvious solution, which is a female team leader, but once we’d gotten to that idea, we very quickly had three subsequent ideas that have come to sort of defining our pilot: A jet crashing into a mountain, which gave us a Navy crime, a bunch of nine-year-old girls on a soccer field being coached by Jane Tennant, our hero, wearing a pink camo sweatsuit, and then later in the episode [SPOILERS REMOVED], that will then help us solve our Navy crime. Those three scenes really do create a framework for what we think our show is: This incredibly smart, charismatic, courageous, intelligent woman who leads a family of agents at work and goes home to her family. Those two parts of the show would be what NCIS: Hawai’i would be about. Now, having had that idea and sort of flushed all that out, then actually things got really hard,” she teased.
“That’s right,” Silber added. “It’s one thing to imagine and create an iconic leading character for a legacy franchise, like Jane Tennant. We’d like to think we’re very creative people. We’ve got a lot of great ideas, but then you have to find the actor who can play the role, who can bring this idea to life. We had a lot of good luck finding all of our amazing cast, but looking for Jane Tennant, someone who was going to be this charismatic leader, became challenging, and luckily ‘Jane Tennant’ found us,” he recalled.
“Vanessa Lachey’s audition just stood out in a way that helped ease the neuroses and the anxieties of writers who were pretty sure that we had set up an impossible task, and she cleared that for us,” he continued. “Vanessa has all of the qualities of Jane Tennant, and now Jane Tennant has all of the qualities of Vanessa. She’s charismatic, she’s smart, she’s charming, she’s empathetic, and she’s absolutely someone that I think all of us would follow off a cliff for.”
NCIS: Hawai’i premieres at 10PM ET/PT Monday, September 20 on CBS.
