Fans of “NCIS” mourn Mark Harmon, but he might return to the show in the future with one stipulation. The state is as follows. Mark Harmon will be sorely missed by NCIS fans as Leroy Jethro Gibbs. When the show started in 2003, Harmon joined it. He portrayed Gibbs for 19 seasons before ending his involvement with it. Fans of NCIS are certain to miss him and wish for his eventual return to the program. Should NCIS fans therefore give up hope of seeing Harmon return? Here is his one requirement that might persuade him to rejoin.
Mark Harmon may return to ‘NCIS’ for the ‘right story’
Mark Harmon said farewell to NCIS in season 19, episode 4, “Great Wide Open.” Leroy Jethro Gibbs is certainly missed, as there’s no other character like him in the series. So, is there any chance that fans could see Harmon return to the small screen for more NCIS in the future?
According to executive producer Steven D. Binder, Harmon might return if a compelling story brings him back. Otherwise, we shouldn’t expect to see the grand return of Gibbs anytime soon.
“There’s always head space for him to come back,” Binder shared with TV Insider in May 2022. “It just has to be the right story, I think, to get him excited about it and to get us excited about it. It’s a card to play, and I don’t think we want to play it cheaply. I think when we do play it, it really needs to be the right thing.”
The NCIS production schedule may also indicate that Harmon might return to the show while viewers would still have to wait several months to see Gibbs back in action. Additionally, we follow a different schedule than other performances, said Binder. Other shows might only have a year or two, or they might not even know how much time they’ll have. For these things, we simply work on a far longer time scale than other shows, whether that is correct or incorrect.
As of 2022, Binder wasn’t in a hurry to create new storylines for Gibbs. “I feel like we left Gibbs in this magical place …,” he said. ” … I saw him in a river, happy, which I never see him as, smiling with a knife in his pocket and fish in the boat. That’s how I imagine him, and that’s how I want to keep imagining him.”
When will ‘NCIS’ return in 2023?
NCIS fans have more to miss than just Mark Harmon. Season 21 of the show didn’t return with CBS’s fall lineup in September 2023 due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. And it’s also not slated to return anytime in 2023. This likely means fans must wait until 2024 before NCIS returns with new episodes.
Fans shouldn’t worry too much, though, as NCIS: Sydney will air for the first time on CBS on November 14, 2023. According to the description of the series, “with rising international tensions in the Indo-Pacific, a brilliant and eclectic team of U.S. NCIS agents and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) are grafted into a multinational task force to keep naval crimes in check in the most contentious patch of ocean on the planet.” The lead characters on the new show are special agent Michelle Mackey and sergeant Jim “J.D.” Dempsey, played by DC’s Legends of Tomorrow’s Olivia Swann and Home and Away’s Todd Lasance, respectively.