The Basements Are Getting Colder

Twenty years is a long time to live on television. Enough time for the people we watch, the actors who populate the edges of the office and the cold concrete of the autopsy rooms, to start leaving the world for real. We get used to the manufactured death on screen—the case closed, the body tagged—but the sudden, final static of true loss feels different.

David McCallum spent two decades in NCIS, the windowless basement where the real work of the show takes place. Not the shouting and the gunfights, but the quiet conversations Ducky had with the recently departed. He talked to them as if they just stepped out for a moment, waiting for a cup of tea. That quiet, forensic curiosity was the steady pulse of the show. Now, that room is silent. The familiar squeak of his chair, the precise knot of the bowtie—gone. His absence leaves a literal void in the set dressing, a place where profound stillness used to be a comfort, and now is just emptiness.

Then there are the fathers. Ralph Waite, the patriarch of Gibbs’ complicated history. Jackson Gibbs was the definition of hard-shell love, a man who gave Jethro the stiffness that made him who he was. Waite’s death happened, and then three months later, the script had to catch up. The character died. The distance between the fiction and the fact vanishes in a sudden, brutal moment of storytelling.

And Miguel Ferrer. The cruelest subtraction was watching his fight written into the script itself. Owen Granger’s failing health wasn't a cheap plot device; it was the physical reality of the man himself, the cancer tightening its grip, turning his voice into a rasp we could hear every week. He stayed in the frame, doing the job, demanding to be seen until the very end. The grit of that performance is unforgettable.

We catalog the others—the ones who came and went, playing a single DA, a one-off Russian mobster, a former Marine. Annie Wersching, a brief, sharp role as a Deputy DA, gone at 45. The sheer speed of that loss. Gregory Itzin, who slipped between roles, moving from a director to a guest spot years later, a familiar face lost to a sudden complication. Vachik Mangassarian, the fake president, Ravil Isyanov, the mob boss Anatoli Kirkin, both gone to cancer within a year of each other. The revolving door of supporting players is suddenly heavy with ghosts.

And the young ones. The losses that feel like a broken circuit. Sam Sarpong, 40, his life ending in a headline we don't want to read. Cheney Kley, 34, gone to something silent in his sleep. They were bit players, but they clocked in, delivered their lines, and now they are part of the vast, cold statistics they usually investigate. They are the details in the file. The scene cut too short.

All of them, every single one, walked through the bullpen doors, touched the cold metal of the holding cells, or stood on the perimeter tape. They left their footprints on the concrete. Now, the main set is just colder, the sound stage just a little bit quieter than it was before the clock started ticking. The autopsy room light is still on, but the conversation is over.