Runester

First day back to work, and as soon as I got in I had to prep and then give a little mini-demonstration. The demo went OK … everything worked as it should. But, it was underwhelming to the extreme. The point of the demo was that certain pop-ups and password prompts didn’t come up – because we had found a way to script through them. In other words, “Look! Nothing happened right there. And, now … there you go! Nothing happened again!” See? The ‘demo of what doesn’t happen isn’t exactly a compelling demo.

We had a new worker join our group – he’s a contractor who will (hopefully!) be hired in a few months. We’ve been pretty understaffed so we can certainly use all the help we can get. Ironically, his name is Stephen, too. So, even though I was assured that there are no other “Steve’s” nearby … there is within a few months of me joining. I guess like celebrity deaths and midnight lines at a fast-food place, “Steve’s” happen in clusters.

Finally, we watched a DVR’ed episode of Numb3rs and then tonight’s episode of NCIS. Those are pretty good shows, though I like NCIS better. The truth, is that it is not the show itself but the characters that make it. It’s basically just another procedural cop drama. The crimes are slightly different because they always involve a Navy Seaman or a US Marine. Except for the occasional “he was a spy” or “terrorists were involved” … the stories are pretty typical of cop drama’s. The thing that really stands out, the “unique selling proposition” for the show is the characters that are on it and their complex relationships.

It’s the gruff old marine, Leroy Jethro Gibbs, who heads up the team, and his slightly eccentric pathologist nicknamed Ducky, Dr. Donald Mallard, who wears a goofy hat and drives a vintage car. There’s the goth chick, Abby Sciotu, with the caffeine addiction who does all their forensic testing, down in the lab. There are the three main field agents – Anthony DiNozzo (movie trivia nut, wanna-be ladies man, Gibbs suck-up), Timothy McGee (computer hacker / whiz, painfully earnest, “probey”), Ziva David (ass kicking outsider, on loan from Mossad, who has finally been made a full member). Each character is unique – not just from each other but from other, similar, cop shows.

If anything, they are almost caricatures because of there extreme traits and how much out-of-the-ordinary they stand out. But, what keeps this from being poorly written schlock is the vulnerabilities and inter-connections. These characters have formed a kind of family and they are fiercely loyal to one another. Probably in complete contrast to a professional NCIS team in real life, here they hug one another and send each other cute postcards, and Gibbs brings down a Super Big Gulp to Abby when he wants some information and she’s been in the lab all day.

• Gibbs is like the gruff but fair father
• Abby is like his daughter
• Ziva is like his older daughter, who is a big sister to Abby
• Anthony and McGee are like brothers – including the sibling rivalry
• Ducky is the kindly, eccentric uncle

So, is that the winning strategy? A family drama wrapped in a cop drama painted with the colors of a federal agency? Seeing as how they are trying to strike gold twice with NCIS: Los Angeles, we’ll see.