Yahoo Lifestyle 'NCIS: Sydney' Showrunner Morgan O'Neill Answers All Your Burning Questions for Season 2 (Exclusive)
When NCIS: Sydney begins its second season tonight, the action picks up right where it left off, with everyone wondering if Colonel Rankin (Lewis Fitz-Gerald) is going to answer the ringing phone.
For those who need a refresher, Season 1 wrapped up with AFP Liaison Officer Sergeant Jim “JD” Dempsey (Todd Lasance) having to release international assassin Ana Niemus (Georgina Haig), who he and NCIS Special Agent Captain Michelle Mackey (Olivia Swann) had captured and were held in a cell at the NCIS office. Then Ana killed the Russian kidnapper, who was also an assassin, but she let JD live. This took place miles from civilization in the desert, so JD had to use the dead kidnapper’s phone to get transportation back to civilization, and when he dialed the only number in the phone, it rang in Colonel Rankin’s pocket.
Everyone turned and looked at Rankin. Mackey put her hand on a gun, and she said, “You going to get that, Colonel?” and then it was fade to black.
“We tossed around a whole bunch of different places about where we could start, but I couldn’t find a more interesting, more exciting one than to literally start with the next intake of breath,” NCIS: Sydney showrunner Morgan O’Neill tells Parade. “And so, we roll straight into what happens next. Without spoiling it, within about 30 seconds, the train has left the tracks, and we are careening down a very different, very unexpected pathway that will ultimately lead us to a much larger geopolitical set of stakes that will occupy us for the second season.”
So, the 10-episode second season begins with a bang and swings for the fences in terms of the crimes that it solves, upping the stakes until the end, but it also takes a deep dive into the personal lives of each of the six characters that make up the team: JD, Mackey, NCIS Special Agent DeShawn Jackson (Sean Sagar), AFP Liaison Officer Constable Evie Cooper (Tuuli Narkle), AFP Forensic Pathologist Dr. Roy Penrose (William McInnes), and AFP Forensic Scientist Bluebird “Blue” Gleeson (Mavournee Hazel).
“We wanted to make sure that we get to the end of Season 2 and the audience has peeled back the skin on each of our six characters in a way that allows them to lean in further, but also in a way that is really unexpected,” O’Neill continues. “This show, at its core, in my view it’s a police procedural obviously, but more subtly and maybe even more importantly, it’s a family drama and a workplace comedy. It’s the combination of those three key elements that underpin the entire show.”
During our Zoom chat with O’Neill, we got him to answer all the burning questions for Season 2. Here’s what he had to say:
Related: NCIS: Sydney Star Todd Lasance on the Shocking Season 1 Cliffhanger
So, is the story going to be an arc, not just a case of the week?
Look, we hold true to the tenet of NCIS as a franchise, which is that these are case-of-the-week standalone episodes. But at the same time, like all good standalone dramas, we have managed to drop in little breadcrumbs across the season so that you start to see the edifice, sort of the exoskeleton of a larger conspiracy that we’re still trying to solve while we’re trying to deal with the problem that we have right in front of us. And as the season progresses, it becomes clearer, and the outline becomes more definitive. And then, the last couple of episodes of Season 2, we confront the boogeyman in real life, so it’s a little bit of both.
The assassin Ana is back. Let’s talk about JD’s emotions when he sees her. On the one hand, she was involved in the kidnapping of his son, but on the other hand, she saved his life, so there’s a push-pull kind of thing going on there.
It’s a really complicated emotional state for JD being face to face with this woman. We can’t forget she was quite happy to kill Mackey and Evie and Blue in the bunker in the second last episode of the first season. She was more than willing to watch them all asphyxiate, so she’s got baggage. But as you point out, she also negotiated the only way that JD could ever hug his son again, and for that, he can’t help but have conflicted emotions towards her.
I feel like there’s a weird friction between them, too. Maybe that’s just me, but there’s a weird psycho-sexual chemistry that goes on between them that I find really intriguing. I’m putting myself in JD’s shoes, as I do a lot of the time of every day, it’s a pretty complicated emotional terrain to navigate, isn’t it?
Both Mackey and JD lose their commands as a result of Ana's "escape," and DeShawn takes over. What kind of a leader does he make, and is this natural for him?
It’s interesting, isn’t it? The fallout from Season 1 is pretty significant for Mackey and JD, especially in the beginning, and Special Agent in Charge Ken Carter (Bert LaBonté) comes down from Singapore and basically reads them the Riot Act and says, “This is a dumpster fire. What the hell is going on here? Go sit over there in the naughty chair until we work out what the hell we do with you,” and it leaves NCIS Sydney with a vacuum of leadership. And so DeShawn, as the next most senior NCIS agent, gets tapped on the shoulder and told to lead the charge, which is fantastic fodder for Evie, who, in her role as chief tormenter of DeShawn, just corrals the rest of the troops, particularly the Australians, into taking the piss out of DeShawn’s leadership as much and as hard as they possibly can.
The truth of the matter is he equips himself pretty well; he demonstrates some pretty good judgment. Obviously, there’s a level of anxiety. He didn’t really expect to be in this position at this point, but he demonstrates a good level of leadership and judgment. It’s something that ultimately becomes tested in episodes as we move through the second season. Because, in Episode 2, he’s called upon to make a couple of on-the-spot judgment calls in terms of how they proceed with the case, which he may not have made had he not been given the opportunity to lead the team in Episode 1.
Related: NCIS: Sydney Star Olivia Swann Reveals Scariest of Australia's Dangerous Critters
We go home with Mackey this season, she has this fabulous apartment with this gorgeous view of the harbor. How can she afford it?
Well, look, we take our jobs very, very seriously in terms of researching the reality of life as an NCIS agent in a foreign country like Australia, and I was fortunate enough to spend New Year’s Eve, the year before last actually, with an NCIS special agent based in Sydney. He lived in a fabulous apartment overlooking Sydney Harbour, not dissimilar to the one that Mackey lives in. It’s because they are in a foreign country at the behest of the Department of State, and so that’s how it all ends up being.
Is it the dollar-to-dollar ratio? Is it that they get paid American money, but they’re living somewhere else? Because I thought living in Australia was very expensive.
I think it’s expensive for Australians, but I do think if you’re taking American dollars in here, your American dollars go a long way in this country. But in any case, Mackey doesn’t hire that place; that place gets booked out well in advance by the people in the government that run all those things, and she just moves in.
What’s interesting, though, when you go into Mackey’s apartment, is that it’s kind of spare, and there are lots of boxes and lots of stuff that doesn’t look like it’s unpacked, and the only things that are unpacked are some photographs. And so, we get the sense of someone who’s kind of caught betwixt and between, she doesn’t know whether this is home. Where is home? Do the photographs represent home, or do the people that she’s starting to form this really profound bond with, is that home? Is that her family too?
Part of Mackey’s journey in Season 2 is to work out where exactly she fits and what Sydney and what her colleagues at NCIS Sydney mean to her and whether they rise to that level of family. And spoiler alert, I think they do.
With both Mackey and JD losing their command, do they get closer this season? Do they bond?
They definitely get closer in Season 2 than Season 1, and that’s natural. That happens in workplaces around the world all day, every day. The more you work with someone, particularly in a high-stress job like that, the more you share, the more you learn about the other person, the more empathetic you become to their situation. And if there’s personal chemistry, the more that chemistry starts to come to the surface, so their relationship deepens across Season 2 significantly.
I’m excited for you to watch the last couple of episodes because we lean into that significantly, and in a really interesting way. We learn that JD’s personal situation is not dissimilar to anyone who’s ever worked a high-power, high-pressure job, where they end up concentrating so much on doing the job that they overlook the other things that are really important in their worlds, like their family. The end of Season 1, JD’s had to confront the reality that he’s focused so much on trying to keep the world safe that he’s taken his eyes off the most important thing in his world, which is his wife and his son, and he’s paying the price for that in Season 2.
And, as a result, we’ve got our two characters, Mackey and JD, both of whom are emotionally a little more vulnerable, a little more open than they were in Season 1. And that’s an interesting place to put them because they obviously have really strong professional chemistry, and the question is, I suppose, where does that take us?
Related: Every NCIS Spinoff and Where to Watch Them
His wife probably isn’t too happy with him. On the one hand, yes, he did get their son back, but on the other hand, it’s his job that made him be kidnapped in the first place.
That’s exactly right, and his marriage is very rocky as a result. We get a pretty clear indication of that at the end of Season 1. So, he’s a guy who’s been emotionally exposed, I suppose, and as you say, there’s a pretty big revelation very early in Season 2 in terms of Mackey’s personal story as well. And when those two things come into contact with one another, there’s a reaction and it’s pretty exciting to watch, I think.
Congratulations, you got two extra episodes this season, so you have 10. Does the fact that it now airs in America, because the idea for it initially was just for Australia, does that affect the content at all or do you still make the same show you would if it was only airing in Australia?
One of the things that we understood really early on was the success of NCIS as a franchise was that wherever the show went, be it Washington, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Hawaii or Sydney, one of the key components to the success of those shows was that they felt like they were from there. New Orleans felt so different to Los Angeles, and Los Angeles felt so different to Hawaii, and so forth, and so that level of authenticity is one of the things that underpins the franchise, and it certainly underpins our show.
So, we didn’t want to shy away from the fact that we’re a very different country, we’re about as far from America as you can get. We’re in a different hemisphere, and though we speak the same language notionally, from time to time, we don’t, and we have different cultural sensibilities. I honestly think that that is part of the success of the show, it’s certainly part of the success of the franchise.
NCIS: Sydney premieres its second season tonight at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CBS. Streams next day on Paramount+.
Next, All the Down Under Details on NCIS: Sydney Season 2 (Including the New Premiere Date)
