Okay, so I think I've started to become a semi-regular watcher of
NCIS: New Orleans.
But hear me out.
1. Starring Scott Bakula.
2. Featuring CCH Pounder.
3. The recurring villains are Callie Thorne (phil) and Steven Weber of
Wings playing totally over the top criminal masterminds that everyone but the NCIS team thinks is on the up and up or doesn't care.
4. The rest of the team is no longer lame, featuring Vanessa Ferlito (last of Chuck on the probably underrated
Graceland), the black guy from
Galaxy Quest playing almost the same role, and the "tech dude" is just goofy in a good way instead of a black hat hack leet dope like on
CSI: Cyber or everywhere else. And this season they added Necar Zadegan (mouf) recently of the underrated U.S. version of
Rake.
5. When Scott Bakula loses his accent nobody cares because I assume Scott Bakula does everything in one take. When the earlier, now gone, characters would lose theirs there'd be some dumb "oh, I spent college in Michigan" or something explanation.
6. If the episode is boring, you can pretend that it's just another of Scott Bakula's leaps he's trapped in, like in the
Always Sunny episode. Or that he's Captain Archer undercover.
7. It's part of the NCIS franchise, so your expectations are almost always at zero except for the fact that Scott Bakula is involved.
8. Scott Bakula doesn't play by the rules, because it'd just be unbelievable to cast Scott Bakula and have him be a by the book loser who plays by the rules.
9. If I didn't just pull up the wikipedia page to look up those other actors I wouldn't even know what Scott Bakula's character's name was because he's just Scott Bakula with a sometimes accent.
10. This season they promoted Scott Bakula to head of the field office so he has wacky hijinks dealing with paperwork and MORE RULES and HANDLERS but he's Scott Bakula so shuddup rules guy I AM GOING UNDERCOVER TO CATCH THIS TERRORIST.
Okay, so it's not really that great, but it's kinda amusing when I remember it exists. My parents watch all the NCIS crap* which is how I first discovered it. Then I realized if I caught it I was watching it because it scratches a Scott Bakula itch I didn't know I was having since
Men of a Certain Age ended.
*I used to make a joke about how when they'd yell or say "NCIS!" to anyone the dude would probably just go "what? who?" and then I discovered the last two seasons they started yelling "FEDERAL AGENTS!" instead. So CBS is spying on my parents house through the TV and rewriting their shows to conform to me sometimes appearing to crack MST3K-type-jokes at their programming.
