The sixth season of NCIS brought a lot of changes to the squad room. The death of Jenny Sheppard brought forth a new director, who didn’t start out on a popular foot by breaking the team up in the last seconds of season five. It didn’t take long for everyone to find their way home though, and we spent quite a bit of time exploring some of the character’s back-stories that we hadn’t necessarily been privy to. I’ve had the DVD set sitting on my shelf to review for quite some time now, and being the Special Feature nut that I am, these are the things that I learned.
“Bodies at Work” – Brian Dietzen hosts a behind-the-scenes look at the creation and use of the corpses and such that are used on the show. The team at WM Creations has been involved with the show since the pilot. This is obviously not a featurette that you want to watch over a TV dinner, if you catch my drift. They talk about the change in how they handle the corpses’ … privacy in recent seasons, but not the reasons why. It was funny to see the Walmart-style storage containers with labels like “Brains,” “Hearts,” and “Organs.”
“Fear” – I’ve known Pauley Perrette has been a singer for quite some time, but have never heard her work. This is an acoustic version of a song of hers, “Fear.” Perrette has an interesting voice, but the song really wasn’t for me.
“Starting with a Bang” – “Bang” is a nice featurette on the main story arc of the sixth season. A couple of interesting tidbits, including that Agent Lee’s death — how it played out — was originally intended for Jenny Sheppard’s character. Producer Shane Brennan envisioned Lee as some kind of traitor as far back as season four.
Commentaries – Two in the set: Michael Weatherly on “Bounce,” and Sean Murray & Pauley Perrette on “Toxic.” I listened to Weatherly’s, who does a pretty good job of having a little fun while providing a little behind-the-scenes info. Anyone that can work in a Joseph Campbell reference is OK in my book. An open request, however, to DVD set producers: I like being able to have a little closed caption action while I listen to a commentary, as it helps one follow the episode, too. Just sayin’.
“Horsin’ Around” – “South by Southwest” was, in my eyes, just an OK episode, but it looks like the location shoot itself, and the whole western theme, was fun for the cast and crew. Unfortunately the special feature fell as flat as the episode itself. Not saying it was “skip worthy,” but it wasn’t for me.
“Season Six: Cruising Along” – Whereas “Bang” covered the introductory arc, “Cruising” touches on the whole season. De Pablo and Weatherly both dance around the “Tiva” ‘shippers on the internets. I’d completely missed that Harmon’s son played the younger version of Gibbs in “Heartland.” A lot of concentration was paid to characters and back-stories in episodes like “Bounce” for Tony, “Heartland” for Gibbs, “Caged” for McGee, “Broken Bird” for Ducky, and pretty much the last several episodes for Ziva. You can really tell, through the interviews, that the cast and crew really like each other and enjoy working together.
“Six Degrees of Conversation” – The cast was brought together for a round-table discussion of the season with Kevin Frasier from Entertainment Tonight. Weatherly is obviously the class clown/center of attention. Rocky Carroll enjoyed the summer getting blasted on the Internet for breaking up the team (posts all written, if you believe him, by Sean Murray). Weatherly doesn’t want Ziva and Tony to get together, because all of Ziva’s boyfriends die. The cast also really enjoyed watching the international versions, and hearing themselves dubbed. It was very nice to see how much these guys truly care about each other, especially watching Harmon getting broken up about how great the team is together.
Disclosure: This review is based on a commercially available copy, provided complimentary to CliqueClack TV by CBS for the purpose of review.
Clacked by Ivey West 
on Nov 10, 2009 @ 16:00 EST5EDT
