‘NCIS’ Spin-Off Officially Won’t Return in 2026

CBS has been enjoying another strong fall season of television, thanks in part to a rejuvenated NCIS. The long-running procedural franchise came out swinging during the network’s premiere week in October with its best night in years, averaging 5.49 million viewers across all three shows to become the most-watched primetime slate that evening. Michael Weatherly‘s return to the flagship series in Season 24 and Mark Harmon‘s presence in front of the camera for NCIS: Origins Season 3 have been a big driver of the increased viewership. However, the latest spin-off, NCIS: New York, marked the biggest improvement.

Taking the 9 p.m. ET/PT timeslot, LL COOL J‘s return to the Big Apple won big with a 53% gain in viewership over Origins‘ Season 2 premiere. Sam Hanna and his new team seem poised to stick around for a while after not only garnering a ton of eyes, but also strong reviews for the purely New York procedural, shot on-site in the city. The addition of a new city to the NCIS fold did, however, leave the franchise’s international arm, NCIS: Sydney, out in the cold. For the first time since its premiere, the joint task force didn’t return to investigate more crimes in the Indo-Pacific region, though that doesn’t mean CBS is done with the agents.

Sydney was still handed a Season 4 renewal alongside its fellow NCIS series back in January, meaning the network is still committed to Supervisory Special Agent Michelle Mackey (Olivia Swann) and her Australian Federal Police partner, Sergeant Jim “JD” Dempsey (Todd Lasance). However, the Eye announced earlier this year that it would be saving the series for midseason, with Tuesday night already full of naval crime investigations. As such, there will be no appearance from Sydney in any form this year, even though filming got underway all the way back in April. It’s one of a few mainstays of CBS lately that’s being kept on the bench to prepare, joining Matlock Season 3 and Ghosts Season 6, though the latter at least had a recent Halloween special.

Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.

You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.

• The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
  honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
  against him.
• You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
  then completely immovable past it.
• Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
  and turning it into technique rather than noise.
• People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
  work.

You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.

• This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
  because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to.
• You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
  defend it past the point of reason.
• You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
  an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
• The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.

You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.

• This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
  rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left.
• You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
  administrative error.
• You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
  The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
• Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.

You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.

• Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
  bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
• You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
  and then it makes you unstoppable.
• You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
  and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
• You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.

‘NCIS: Sydney’

• photo: Daniel Asher Smith/Paramount+ / ©CBS / Courtesy Everett Collection

• Image via Paramount+

• Image via Paramount+

• Image via CBS

photo: Daniel Asher Smith/Paramount+ / ©CBS / Courtesy Everett Collection

Image via Paramount+

Image via Paramount+

Image via CBS

When Sydney does return, the same agents should be back in the field with Swann and Lasance, including Sean Sagar, Tuuli Narkle, Mavournee Hazel, and William McInnes. Since the series premiered in 2023 as an NCIS arm imagined for Australian audiences, it’s been much more than its television following, becoming a smash hit on Paramount+ despite being outperformed by its peers. Season 3 ended with the joint task force of NCIS and AFP taking down the Collective at last, leaving room for new cases and criminals to tangle with going forward. There were also some hints at the growing chemistry between Mackey and JD when the former tells the latter he’s “a real catch.”

Speaking to TV Insider, Swann described the tension as valuable to the series’ future. Building up the possibility of a couple among leads is part of just about every procedural, NCIS definitely included, and she’s curious to see how the creative team under Morgan O’Neill navigates that as Mackey and JD’s feelings become more prevalent.

“The ‘will-they-won’t-they’ between the two leads of a procedural is a tale as old as time. As much as you want them to lay it all bare and just go for it, you’re at risk of losing some of the simmering, unresolved tension that’s so fun to watch. I think you’re right though, Mackey and JD’s feelings are becoming harder for them to ignore, and I’d say that’s just as compelling. They’re two people who deeply care for one another, have each other’s backs — there’s so much love, in many senses of the word, between them already. I think it would be really dynamic to see how they interact with the heightened awareness that their feelings may be growing.”

“The ‘will-they-won’t-they’ between the two leads of a procedural is a tale as old as time. As much as you want them to lay it all bare and just go for it, you’re at risk of losing some of the simmering, unresolved tension that’s so fun to watch. I think you’re right though, Mackey and JD’s feelings are becoming harder for them to ignore, and I’d say that’s just as compelling. They’re two people who deeply care for one another, have each other’s backs — there’s so much love, in many senses of the word, between them already. I think it would be really dynamic to see how they interact with the heightened awareness that their feelings may be growing.”

A date hasn’t been set for NCIS: Sydney‘s return in 2026. Stay tuned here at Collider for more on the future of the international spin-off.

NCIS: Sydney