John McNamara wants NCIS: Tony & Ziva fans to know — if you don’t like that opening wedding tease, take it up with Ziva.
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” McNamara told Entertainment Weekly ahead of the premiere of the sixth spinoff in the sprawling NCIS franchise on Thursday. “The wedding opening was totally Cote de Pablo’s idea.”
McNamara, the man running operations on Tony & Ziva, who previously created the series Aquarius and The Magicians, revealed that the decision to open the series with Michael Weatherly’s Tony DiNozzo and de Pablo’s Ziva David gazing wistfully at one another in wedding attire “started on a Zoom call. We were in very early stages of development, and I had kind of a vague outline for the first episode, and a beautiful bible for the series.”
Speaking with the series’ stars, who also serve as executive producers on Tony & Ziva, McNamara recalled that “Cote just said she had a vision that the show begins with what looks like a wedding, and turns out to not be a wedding. I said, ‘Why?’ And she goes, ‘Well, I don’t know. That’s your job.'”
Marcell Piti/Paramount+
NCIS: Tony & Ziva puts a fresh set of tires on one of the most storied will-they-won’t-theys in TV history. A decade after they last shared the screen on the series they both affectionately refer to as “the mothership,” Tiva, as hardcore fans have dubbed them, are back with a dedication to their quirky, globetrotting exploits.
The first three episodes currently streaming on Paramount+ reveal that the Tiva dynamic remains as ambiguous as ever. But that shocking opening tease suggests something more. Even if, as McNamara points out, it “turns out to not be a wedding.”
Having settled in Paris to co-parent their daughter Tali (Isla Gie), Tony and Ziva become embroiled mere minutes into the pilot episode in an international heist that sets them in the crosshairs of Interpol. They must team up with eccentric tech wiz Boris (Maximilian Osinski) and his free-spirited fiancée Fruzsi (Anne-Marie Waldeck) to elude capture and prove their innocence, with Ziva going as far as impersonating Fruzsi on their wedding day in order to lure and trap the villainous Martine (Nassima Benchicou).
McNamara revealed that he had a different opener planned for the series, but he couldn’t get de Pablo’s audacious idea out of his head. “Six months later, I think we figured it out, but it took a while,” he said.
Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.
De Pablo said she was initially hesitant to surround Tiva with a new team, after they were incubated so carefully and for so long on the mothership. But McNamara’s ultimate conception of the series straddling a “fine line between a techno thriller and workplace comedy,” as Tony puts it in episode 1, won her over.
“What he’s done is really remarkable. He’s built a really beautiful world,” she said. “It was incredibly ambitious to be able to explain the past, give the fans what they wanted, explore the romance, and go into the psychological stuff — the things within the characters that are breaking that they need to fix as they’re trying to find each other and trying to keep their daughters safe. It’s an incredibly ambitious thing that he did, and I feel that he executed beautifully.”
Jason Bell/Paramount+
De Pablo previously shared that she felt it was “critical that the fans got a little bit of the Tony and Ziva,” specifically “that there was sort of a romantic payoff that they never got in the mothership.”
Weatherly agreed, but felt with the chemistry he and de Pablo have built over the past 20 years, sparks flying was an inevitability. “That just happens when Cote and I are in a room together and the circumstances are right, and we have some preposterous scenario that we’ve got to figure our way through. We just look at each other and are almost on the verge of laughing all the time, because there’s nothing but truth.”
The veteran TV star shared that when “Cote and I are in a scene, and we lock eyes, it’s like, ‘You better put your bulls–t away, ’cause she’s coming straight forward.’ I love you, Cote.”
The first three episodes of NCIS: Tony & Ziva are currently streaming on Paramount+, with new episodes dropping each Thursday through Oct. 23.
