Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
There’s a reason why the NCIS franchise has been so successful over the past two decades; the mix of military crime investigations, high-tech gizmos, and a scintilla of character backstories is catnip to CBS’s viewers. There’s not much about NCIS: Hawai’i that strays from that formula. But, with Vanessa Lachey in the lead, creators Christopher Silber, Jan Nash and Matt Bosack have at least set up a somewhat different dynamic. Read on for more.
NCIS: HAWAI’I: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Scenes of people having fun in the sun on Ohau. Then, people look up and see a fighter jet coming in low, crashing into a nearby mountain.
The Gist: A dramatic scene unfolds when Jane Tennant (Vanessa Lachey), coaching her daughter’s soccer team on the Pearl Harbor Joint Base, gets called in on the fighter jet crash; a helicopter lands on the field and she gets in right away. She’s the first female head of NCIS: Pearl, and when she goes to the crash site, she declares it a crime scene, much to the consternation of Captain Joe Milius (Enver Gjokaj), a high-ranking commander of the Pacific Fleet. It’s a top-secret project, but Tennant tells him that the pilot called NCIS with espionage concerns the night before he crashed.
This is when she engages her team: Jesse Boone (Noah Mills), her second-in-command; Lucy Tara (Yasmine Al-Bustami), a brash agent who has been there for about a year; and Ernie Malik (Jason Antoon), her wide-eyed tech specialist. Missing is the “new guy”, Kai Holman (Alex Tarrant), who just transferred to Pearl two weeks prior in order to take care of his ailing father; she picked him up from an HPD station after he got mixed up with some patrol cops about how they broke up a fight.
As they get to the bottom of why the pilot crashed, we see a few interesting tidbits from the team. When Kai goes to a surf club to investigate a lead, he insists on going alone; it’s because his close friend is there, upset that he ghosted everyone on the island when he went into the military — “You don’t turn your back on the ocean,” she says to him. Lucy breaks protocol by sneaking a peak at an autopsy report that was being held by Kate Whistler (Tori Anderson), a special agent of the Defense Intelligence Agency; when she goes to Kate’s apartment to apologize, we see that they have a history.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Take any of the shows from the NCIS franchise (Los Angeles, New Orleans) and mix them with the scenery of the modern version of Hawaii Five-0, and this is the result.
Our Take: While we don’t one hundred percent buy Lachey as a determined, hard-nosed military investigator who has broken the glass ceiling at the top of a big NCIS division, she doesn’t do anything in the pilot to indicate that she won’t be able to get comfortable in the part of Tennant. We see that she’s a single mom and that she has to deal with her preteen daughter Julie (Mahina Napoleon) and surly teen son Alex (Kian Talan), and we’ll likely see more of that as time goes on, and she also seems to be positioning herself as a mentor to Kai. Where it goes from there is anyone’s guess.
Kai’s story is the most developed, because he seems to be the only one on the team who’s a native of the state. So he’ll have to reconcile his father’s ailment, his responsibilities towards his job and his family, but his inner knowledge of what’s going on in Oahu will likely aid in the investigations.
Everything else seems superfluous at the moment, including the Lucy/Kate thing, which we hope wasn’t introduced just to get dropped as the season goes along. But, as we said, continuing storylines and character backstories aren’t the strength of NCIS, so we should at least be happy that we got that much character background in the pilot.
We wish the mystery in the first episode, involving Chinese spies, a dead girlfriend and stolen technology, was a bit less jargony and confusing, but as with all CBS procedurals, the cases will vary in quality from week to week. Would we like more consistency, considering that the cases drive the drama in each episode? Sure. But that feels like a lot to ask of any of the network’s procedurals.
Sex and Skin: Besides Lucy and Kate having a brief make-out when Lucy goes to apologize, there’s nothing.
Parting Shot: The team has a potluck on Jane’s back deck after cracking the case.
Sleeper Star: We’ve seen Jason Antoon’s bug-eyed presence on so many shows, it’s good to see him get a regular gig on an NCIS series. He adds some levity to the self-important team, even if his technical wizardry is confined to typing a few keystrokes and then looking on a screen that has all the answers.
Most Pilot-y Line: When Jane tells Kate that Lucy’s protocol breach was “No harm, no foul,” Kate replies. “No. Harm. Foul.” Wow. That’s. Bad.
Our Call: STREAM IT if you’re an NCIS fan. NCIS: Hawai’i will give you more of the same stuff you love, with the Aloha state as a beautiful backdrop. If you’re expecting anything deeper than that, though, you should SKIP IT.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
