The new episode of NCIS featured a lot of guest stars, including Jack McGee and Laura San Giacomo from Just Shoot Me and Pretty Woman, but it also took the time to crack a joke about TPS reports.
This was NCIS Season 19, Episode 17, and it served as the first part of a crossover event with NCIS: Hawai’i. Within that context, we learned that Agent Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) was rumored to have had a relationship with Agent Tennant (Vanessa Lachey) while at a past conference.
Tennant called up Director Vance and then spoke with Torres about a break in a case that he had been working on for nearly five years. He would then travel with Agent Knight (Katrina Law) over to Hawai’i to get to the bottom of that mystery.
But outside of Torres and his trip to Hawai’i, there was another case that involved the death of someone who had been in a grief group that Knight and Dr. Jimmy Palmer were in. Knight was still dealing with the death of her former team, while Palmer was still dealing with the death of his wife.
TPS reports joke on NCIS
“What I’d give to never have to file another TPS report,” Alden Parker said as people at the NCIS offices were complaining about paperwork near the beginning of the episode.
When he was corrected by Agent McGee and told that they are TBS reports, Parker said, “Old habits. Weird.”
This whole conversation was a throwback to a role that actor Gary Cole played in the movie Office Space, long before he joined the NCIS cast. In that film, he was always hounding one of the main characters to get his TPS reports turned in.
Below is a video where those TPS reports were referenced in Office Space.
Jack McGee and Dr. Grace on the NCIS cast
Guest-starring on the NCIS cast for this episode was veteran actor Jack McGee, who appeared as Richard “Rick” Jordan. The character’s daughter had died in the military, and it led to him being an early suspect in a case where her helicopter pilot was murdered.
McGee has been featured in a lot of films and TV shows over the years and is quite recognizable as a supporting character in a lot of them. He played firefighter Schmidt in Backdraft, he was a sheriff in Basic Instinct, he was the drunk Santa Claus (Tony Falacchi) in the remake of Miracle on 34th Street, and he was recently seen as George Ward in The Fighter.
Below is a recent interview that McGee provided.
As for Dr. Grace Confalone, that character is played by actress Laura San Giacomo. She has been featured on the show before, but she surfaced in this new episode because she is running the grief group that so many characters are involved with. It turned out that Tobias Fornell (Joe Spano) was even in the group.
Some of the past roles that Laura San Giacomo played were Kit De Luca in Pretty Woman, Maya Gallo on the hit TV show Just Shoot Me!, and recently Morgan Wilson on the TV show Animal Kingdom.
In other news about the show, there was an NCIS reunion of sorts on the set of Bull. It involved two former NCIS stars reuniting on a different show.
NCIS airs Mondays at 9/8c on CBS.