By spring 2007, the CBS drama "NCIS" looked to have run out of luck.
The show, about a team of special agents who investigate Navy crimes, had become a stalwart of the CBS lineup, even though it never attracted the media buzz enjoyed by many far less popular shows. But a poisonous rift with star Mark Harmon led to the sudden and unceremonious departure of co-creator Don Bellisario, who happens to be one of the most successful producers in TV history (his credits include "Magnum, P.I." and "Quantum Leap"). For a series that was then winding up its fourth season, such a development seemed destined to hasten a creative and ratings decline.
Miraculously, that didn't happen. "NCIS" has come back stronger and on Tuesday reached its largest audience ever, with 18.8 million total viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. This season, only "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and "Dancing With the Stars" have bigger audiences.
Although most hits begin to fade by their sixth season, "NCIS" is seeing new growth -- and doing so amid a very tough market for network series in general. "We've had changes in front of the camera, behind the camera," Harmon told me in a phone interview last week. "And if you look at the result, I think in all cases we've gotten better."
If the producers could figure out a way to bottle their secrets and hawk them on studio lots, they could probably retire now and maybe fund their kids' retirements too. But "NCIS" is one of those go-figure success stories. All sorts of theories -- we'll get to them in a minute -- profess to explain why the show has kept growing.
Yet what seems maybe more intriguing are the counter-arguments, all the reasons "NCIS" shouldn't work as well it does.
Which are: The media try very hard to ignore the show. Producers realize it doesn't perform as well in New York and Los Angeles as it does in smaller markets, perhaps because the series started as a spinoff of "JAG," a popular CBS military crime drama (and Bellisario creation) that some critics found jingoistic. Harmon and the producers insist "NCIS" isn't just a procedural, but the crime-solving element is still at the heart of every episode, and network TV is drowning in crime shows. "NCIS" has seen a parade of cast changes, moreover, including abrupt exits by costars Sasha Alexander (whose character was felled by a sniper's bullet at the end of Season 2) and Lauren Holly (dispatched in a gun battle in the fifth-season finale).
