NCIS: Sydney Season 2 review: polished, professional, pretty good

The field of series about US high-tech supercops – some military, others merely heavily armed elite civilians – is so crowded that entire franchises can be built on the slightest difference. They might seem all alike from a distance, what with them all featuring handsome multi-racial teams splitting their time between staring at extremely large screens and chasing down generic bad guys, but rest assured: those differences do exist.

Which is a fancy way of saying that in a crowded field NCIS, one of the elder statesmen of the format (having helped establish it back in the dawn of time when it was a spin-off from the more conventional legal drama JAG) is the one that doesn’t always take itself too seriously.

So when it was announced a few years back that there was going to be a Sydney based version, it made at least some sense: aside from the ‘well, it’s slightly plausible that US military police would operate in a city with a large US naval presence’ thing, the whole action-with-wisecracks vibe was a good fit with the usual Aussie stereotypes in a way that a more serious body of the week show wouldn’t have been.

Long story short, the first season was – by US supercop drama standards – a lot of fun. And now it’s back.

Watch the trailer for NCIS: Sydney Series 2

Even the ‘fun one’ (relative term) knows you have to get serious if you want people to come back after a nine-month break. So the first season ended with spies pulling off Mission: Impossible style masks, Australian Federal Police Sergeant Jim ‘JD’ Dempsey (Todd Lasance) dealing with his son being kidnapped, people being shot in the outback (the most painful place to be shot) and a possible traitor in the ranks.

How to top all that? How about opening with a funeral?

The fact NCIS Special Agent Michelle Mackey (Olivia Swann) isn’t at the funeral suggests she might be in the coffin; fortunately she’s still in the opening credits, so this isn’t just a way to cover her jumping ship between seasons.

So who’s dead? Where’d the other suspect go? Where’s Mackey? And what about the shonky colonel with possible links to the Russian mafia?

ScreenHub: NCIS: Sydney Season 1 review

More than most supercop series, tonal whiplash comes with the NCIS territory. Even at moments of maximum seriousness NCIS: Sydney can still deliver moments like William McInnes’ pathologist using a Bluetooth speaker to disable a runaway pacemaker, followed by JD reading a picture book to his now unkidnapped son, followed by a grumpy debrief in a room that has a huge Bofors anti aircraft gun in the background. And that’s all before the first ad break.

With the top-tier agents suspended (like that’s going to stop them), it’s up to sassy underlings NCIS Special Agent DeShawn Jackson (Sean Sagar) and AFP Liaison Officer Constable Evie Cooper (Tuuli Narkle) to step up, which largely means more snappy banter as he overly embraces Australian culture, she rolls her eyes, and then they get covert phone calls updating them on the high stakes drama of the main plot.

Which, without giving anything away, resolves itself in a manner that means the series can continue much as before. What a relief!

As is usually the way, the super-dramatic high stakes first episode back is something of an aberration. Future episodes return to the tested formula of being not all that serious, as the team tackle cases such as a teen’s driving lesson that features a car bomb (‘my first car was a real bomb, but it’s got nothing on this,’ says JD), a fake arm found at a construction site that’s attached to a real body, and a military training accident (or is it?) in Darwin. Which means they actually fly to Darwin, in yet another reminder that this series is operating on a financial level well above most other local productions.

Beyond the usual formulaic pleasures, NCIS: Sydney is notable for making Sydney and anywhere else they visit look really good: when even an establishing shot of a regular suburban house manages to fit in the Sydney skyline in the distance you know you’re watching a show that didn’t come cheap.

It’s also not painful to watch as an Australian. This feels like a real co-production – the US provides the formula and a few stars, Australia brings the supporting cast, the locations, and the society where it all takes place – and they’re not afraid to make the occasional joke about how the Americans don’t quite have a handle on the local culture.

So yes, for the most part this is your traditional mystery of the week material. Someone turns up dead, there’s some kind of link to the US Navy, here comes NCIS and their AFP sidekicks. But in Australia! Which, when the end product is this polished, turns out to be enough for an hour’s worth of quality background entertainment while you check social media on your phone.

NCIS: Sydney premieres on Paramount+ on 7 February 2025.

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