Tony DiNozzo and Ziva David had all the makings of a great procedural “would they/wouldn’t they” on NCIS, but it looked like they’d fall into the tragic second half of that equation when Cote de Pablo left the flagship show in Season 11.
Weatherly followed suit two seasons later, leaving fans to wonder if “Tiva” would ever get to ride off into the sunset. Sure, NCIS brought the couple back for a special adventure in 2020, but their fate was still up for interpretation.
Now, fans will get to see what DiNozzo and Ziva have been up to in the spinoff Tony & Ziva, which sees the former crime-fighting duo living abroad in Europe, co-parenting their daughter Tali before getting embroiled in an international cyber terrorism plot. Premiering Sept. 4, it’s a serial story that ups the ante on action, hijinks, and drama.
“We agreed that it wasn’t going to be a procedural, and it was going to shoot in Europe. The characters live in Paris, and rather than a case of the week or a murder mystery, it was going to involve international espionage,” showrunner and executive producer John McNamara tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “Those decisions were made pretty early with the three of us [McNamara, Weatherly, and de Pablo, who also serve as EPs]. We pulled in the studio as quickly as we could and got the story approved, and I started writing the first episode.”
Tiva on Shaky Ground
Tony & Ziva begins in October 2025, which means there are five years of timeline between when the audience last saw DiNozzo and Ziva together and where we’re dropped in at the start of Tony & Ziva. They are still the characters that fans will recognize, but time has altered their relationship to each other and themselves.
“DiNozzo has gone from being Gibbs’ [Mark Harmon] mentee and being that the guy at the desk in the squad room, who is a reliable number two. In that position, he’s the son of his father,” Michael Weatherly reveals. “Now, he is the father of the daughter. He is the president of his own security company. He has matured and grown into the version of himself that I don’t think he could have ever really done on the mother ship back then. Once I figured all that out, that’s what I wanted to illustrate and show to the audience.”
The character may be feeling more secure in himself, but leave it to Ziva to make him question what he knows to be true. It took multiple seasons on NCIS for Tony to break down the walls of the Israeli assassin, and as soon as it felt like he may have finally worked his way into her heart, she disappeared and left him to discover he had a daughter he never knew about.
“Ziva is this kind of carryover from the old days. She is still putting him in a place where he feels like number two. I wanted that power struggle to be part of DiNozzo in this relational journey for Tony and Ziva,” Weatherly says about the pair’s dynamic in the opening episodes of the new series.
“I think DiNozzo is a late bloomer,” he continues. “He needed to figure out who he was. Just when he started to feel like he really figured it out, Ziva showed back up and blew everything he thought he knew apart. How can he trust somebody who didn’t tell him that he had a child? Does she have other children? What other stuff has she lied about? I think it reignites a deep insecurity.”
That tension is the meat of the new series. The difference between now and when they were on NCIS is that they have a daughter who keeps them in orbit of each other.
“They have opposing points of view all the time. The main difference between them that we all agreed on is that they are parents now,” McNamara explains. “They are parents to a 12 year old, so they can’t indulge in the same shenanigans that they might have in their twenties and thirties when they were single and solving cases in D.C.”
Changing the Map
A studio-approved trip to Europe to film a spy series is great work if you can get it, but the creative trio also wanted to ensure they had a story to tell the fans who have been following this couple for over two decades. That meant shaking up the format of the storytelling for more creative freedom and to give the audience, whether they watched NCIS or not, something new.
“These characters and this relationship is really unfinished…What kind of story would organically bring them together and drop their defenses, drop their hurt feelings, and whatever is keeping them apart?” McNamara says of ditching the procedural structure for a serial adventure. “All of it drops away as soon as they are international fugitives. I felt like this would serve their relationship better. I wanted to, and assumed the audience would like to, focus on the relationship. One continuous story where the pressure keeps increasing and increasing, and the stakes get higher and higher, felt like it would serve the relationship best.”
The setting and the time jump meant filling in the gap between where fans last saw Tony and Ziva and the start of the series. The uninitiated and those needing a refresher get a catch-up at the beginning of the pilot episode, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the last five years. They were questions that Weatherly needed to answer for himself before stepping back into DiNozzo’s shoes.
“It wasn’t so much about imposing what I thought should be different or changed, as much as following the sort of path that I thought he would have gone on, like the life he would have lived,” Weatherly says.
As the story continues, it pushes the angst to bigger emotional heights, which Weatherly believes is going to be a treat for fans and may even lead to some rewatching.
“I didn’t want to come back just to solve crimes. I had a lot of fun doing that for 13 years, and I had a lot of fun being in the courtroom with Dr. Bull for six years. This is more psychological and emotional in a weirdly fun way for the audience,” he says. “It’s a show that if you watch the ten episodes, you might want to have a gummy and go back and start Episode 1 again. You’re going to be like, ‘There’s a little bit of Cubism. There’s a little bit of Picasso going on there.’”
While things have been shaken up, McNamara wants to assure the audience that there is still familiarity within these characters and the world that Tony & Ziva is exploring.
“One of the things that I love about NCIS is the tone. It’s such a unique tone for a procedural, or for a drama, because it’s funny. It’s always been funny,” he says. “I wanted to keep [Tony and Ziva] funny, but I don’t want to shy away from the real things that have hurt them over the years. I want to delve into how they correct that. How do they point it back to each other? I have a feeling the audience wants to see a continuous story that pummels them and brings them back together.”
Tony & Ziva premieres with three episodes on Thursday, Sept. 4 on Paramount+. The series will continue with new episodes every Thursday.
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