Wilmer Valderrama Says 'NCIS' Will Return With New Romance and More Humor

There’s a whole lot of shaking up going on when NCIS returns for its 22^nd season on CBS tonight. Jessica Knight (Katrina Law) has taken a new job with REACT (Regional Enforcement Action Capabilities Team) at Camp Pendleton in California, so she’s all the way across the country from the team. Tim McGee (Sean Murray) is in the process of applying for a job as Deputy Director, so he’s out of the office. Nick Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) has gone undercover on an assignment, which leaves Alden Parker (Gary Cole) solo in the D.C. NCIS orange offices.

“You’re going to find that all the roads of these characters are going to collide back to either, are we still a team or are we not?” Valderrama teases Parade. “What I can honestly say about the season is that we wanted to go back to certain values, we wanted to go back to some things while still innovatively breaking the mold and having a little bit more fun with the stories.”

Toward that goal, the stories won’t necessarily be as much about the case of the week, as they will be a dive into the characters, which is what viewers love about the show.

“I’m really excited about it because the show really shines when our characters are at the center of the story, and it’s very rare for a procedural show to take that road,” Valderrama continues. “And because we have it like that and we have the runway of having 20 episodes, we get to really pave that road consistently.”

This season Valderrama promises will see a new romance for Torres, not a returning one, and more humor out of a sense of what the world needs right now.

“With the state of affairs in the world right now, I think that NCIS has had a responsibility when it comes to speaking to so many beautiful fans, that wherever we are in the world, we should meet it with a challenge,” he says. “If the challenge is to bring a little more positivity for our fans considering how dim the world seems lately, we’re going to lighten it up a little bit more, too. The cases are still going to have weird twists, don’t get me wrong, but at the very least with how we solve the case, we’re going to inject a little bit more humor.”

Related: NCIS Star Wilmer Valderrama Talks Fez, Immigration and Family in An American Story

In his recently released memoir, An American Story: Everyone 's Invited, Valderrama talks about how he collaborated with the writing and producing team when he was first cast in the role of Nick Torres on NCIS to help flesh out the character and he says that collaboration continues to this day.

“To be fair, they do that with a lot of our characters,” he says. “Any actor who’s curious about where they’re going to go as a character, they get to contribute now. The door’s always open to collaborate on where they feel this character should go next, and our writers after so many episodes, they’re even more open now. They’ve written so much, they’re even more open like, ‘What else you got?’”

Related: Is Wilmer Valderrama Leaving His Role as Special Agent Torres on NCIS?

The collaboration also keeps the work fresh for Valderrama, who plans to stay with NCIS for several years to come, but he is also working at the same time on developing a dream project, a remake of Zorro, a show that was his favorite as a young boy growing up in Venezuela.

“The project that we’re developing will pay legacy to the Guy Williams’ Zorro, and it also combines the many ways that Zorro was told in different comic books and books,” Valderrama shares. “We’re heavy in development, we definitely have a script, and we’ll figure out where we’ll be next.”

NCIS premieres tonight at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.

Next, NCIS Is Going to 'Take It to the Limit' When it Returns For Its 22nd Season