Sep 22, 2014 08:50 PM ET | by Liz Raftery
NCIS: New Orleans was never supposed to be a series.
But that changed when NCIS creator Gary Glasberg — with a little nudge from star Mark Harmon — got swept away by the city’s food, culture, music and overall charm. And meeting D’Wayne Swear, the real-life NCIS agent on whom Scott Bakula‘s NCIS: New Orleans character is based, didn’t hurt either.
“Every year I sit down with Mark Harmon, and we talk about sweeps episodes for NCIS. And I told him that I had heard that there was a retired agent in New Orleans who ran the office here for 20 years, and I thought we could do a fun story,” Glasberg, who’s now serving as showrunner on both series, told TVGuide.com during a recent set visit. “He looked at me and said, ‘Gary, that’s not a sweeps episode. That’s a series.’ And the next thing I knew, I was down here researching and met D’Wayne Swear. And the rest is history.”
Bakula was brought on board to play Special Agent in Charge Dwayne Cassius Pride, the fictionalized version of Swear, and soon moved his family down to New Orleans for the new gig. “In terms of series, you’re looking for a character that can go and last for a long period of time,” he tells TVGuide.com. “If you’re lucky enough to be in a long-running series, you want to have a character that’s interesting, that has flaws, that has problems … so that the stories have a place to go and can keep you interested and keep the audience interested.