NCIS: Origins is a CBS prequel series set in 1991 that traces the earliest days of Leroy Jethro Gibbs and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service unit that would become one of television's most enduringly beloved procedural teams. Austin Stowell plays the young Gibbs — a former Marine Scout Sniper trying to rebuild his life after personal tragedy — who joins a newly assembled NCIS team at Camp Pendleton, California, under the command of Agent Mike Franks (Kyle Schmid), the mentor whose influence would shape Gibbs's entire career. The series functions both as a standalone crime drama and as an origin story that illuminates the formative experiences behind the character Mark Harmon spent twenty-one seasons portraying.

Mark Harmon himself serves as executive producer and provides the show's narration — an authorial presence that frames the series as an account of his own character's past, lending each episode a retrospective weight that distinguishes it from a conventional prequel. The 1991 setting is rendered with careful period detail, from the technology and cultural atmosphere of the Gulf War era to the specific institutional structures of a law enforcement agency that was, at that point, still establishing its protocols and identity. Each episode presents a standalone case while building a serialized portrait of how a team forms and how its members come to trust each other in high-stakes situations.

NCIS: Origins premiered in October 2024 as part of CBS's Monday night lineup and drew immediately strong ratings, as audiences who had grown up with the original NCIS found in the prequel a way to revisit a world they knew while experiencing it in new form. The show benefits from the specific pleasures of the prequel format when executed with craft: the audience knows where these characters are going, which transforms ordinary moments of connection or conflict into something more freighted with meaning. It represents CBS's most ambitious expansion of the NCIS franchise since its first spinoff and streams on Paramount+.