NCIS fan favourites are at the centre of an action-packed adventure in new spinoff Tony & Ziva

NCIS has spawned its fair share of spinoffs over the years, yet none of these have been as highly anticipated as NCIS: Tony & Ziva, which debuts this week on Paramount+.

NCIS agents Tony Di Nozzo (Michael Weatherly) and Ziva David (Cote de Pablo) were fan favourites when the actors exited the show, de Pablo in 2013 and Weatherly in 2016.

To recap: Ziva was killed in the line of duty, with Tony later discovering that she’d had their baby and hadn’t told him. He left NCIS to raise their child — a daughter named Tali — until Ziva returned, having faked her own death to prevent Tony and Tali from the wrath of a vengeful operative. The reunited couple then retreated to Paris to raise their daughter in what seemed like a happy ending.

Or so viewers thought. In the new series, Tony and Ziva are both living in the City of Lights, but are no longer a couple, with Tony running a successful security company. When his company is attacked by mysterious forces, the two are forced back together and go on the run, Tali in tow, while they “try to figure out who is after them and maybe even learn to trust each other again so that they can finally have their unconventional happily ever after.”

When the stars appeared at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival, de Pablo joked that the show’s title should have been NCIS: Trust No One. “I think the idea of trust, and the idea of how this relationship moves forward is something that was intriguing to us as actors,” she said, as reported by Variety. “We’re trying to address the idea of trust and we’re trying to address how they move forward parenting together with this child and trying to make things work and having a lot of challenges thrown at them.”

Meanwhile, Weatherly says that theme applies not just to Tony and Ziva, but even more so for their daughter, played by newcomer Isla Gie. “When you think about Tali, who is really the third character in Tony & Ziva, the idea for her to think that her mother was dead, and then her mother is alive, but was running around the world and didn’t come home to protect her,” Weatherly explained. “Trust doesn’t mean truth, doesn’t mean honesty. Just because I’m telling you the truth doesn’t mean you can trust me. And I think that a lot of the relationships inside . . . You have a daughter who’s going to question the story. ‘No dad — you told me she was dead, and she just walked through the door.’ ‘Yeah, but your mom had reasons . . .’ ‘No, no, no. The facts are the facts.’ And then what are your relationships like? Where do you stand with the truth? And who do you trust? I mean, these are like the core principles of the show.”

Unlike all the other NCIS shows, Tony & Ziva is set and shot in Europe, something that de Pablo — who, like Weatherly, is one of the show’s exec producers — felt was a necessity.

“At the beginning, I was very adamant about that, like, ‘No, I’m not interested if that’s where they want to go,’” de Pablo said of suggestions the show be set in the U.S. “I really think the show should be taken out of the United States. It would separate us from the agency, and it would give us a chance to sort of reinvent it in a completely different way, from a different standpoint.”

Meanwhile, fans of the original show and its other spinoffs will quickly notice that Tony & Ziva does not follow the same template. “It’s not an evergreen procedural,” noted Weatherly. “It’s not structured the same way. Will the audience show up for that? Are we shooting out of our weight class here with a different kind of story? Is it not going to feel like the other show?”

Ultimately, though, Weatherly firmly believes that it’s fans love for the characters that will attract them into this new story, and then draw them into a new adventure. “I think that we’re going to be bringing people into a world that might feel small, because it’s just Tony, Tali and Ziva. But it’s Europe. It’s love. It’s the universe. And we have to save those things.”

The series premiere of Walking with Dinosaurs airs Tuesday, August 26, on BBC Earth