As ‘NCIS: New Orleans’ reaches its end, an ‘authentic’ depiction of the city goes along with it Movies / TV

Say what you will about the artistic merits of ‘NCIS: New Orleans’, at least its characters never hosted a gumbo party.

And now that it’s gone, the program will be missed.

The locally-recorded, big-budget CBS drama, a bonanza for local film crews and companies that cater to the TV and film industry, ends its seven-year series with a series finale on May 16th.

“NCIS: New Orleans” describes the sometimes overlapping professional and personal sagas of a Naval Criminal Investigative Service team led by Dwayne Pride, played by Scott Bakula.

It did not necessarily strive for the same hyper-Big Easy cultural realism as ‘Treme’, the post-Katrina HBO prestige project of David Simon and Eric Overmyer.

But the local references are also not as bad as “K-Ville,” the short-lived drama from 2007 set in post-Katrina New Orleans (hence the “K”). One ridiculous ‘K-Ville’ episode introduced confused residents to the previously unknown concept of a ‘gumbo party’.

“One of the gifts that ‘NCIS: New Orleans’ gave to the city was how much they shot on location and in music venues, and the support they gave to cultural organizations,” said Carroll Morton, director of the New Orleans film office, said. “They were very focused on being authentic and conveying the culture, wealth and beauty of the city to the world.”

“NCIS: New Orleans” is shot through the greater New Orleans area and into the NIMS Center soundtrack in Harahan. The shooting for the seventh and final season is expected to take place in March.

Since its premiere in 2014, the program has been a cornerstone of the local film industry with approximately 200 crew members.

The program spent $ 92 million per season locally, based on figures reported in the state’s film and TV tax credit incentive program. The program reimburses as much as 40% of local production costs, which means that the show paid ten million dollars over time.

Morton said he has the biggest budget for any TV show shot locally.

” NCIS: New Orleans’ has taken the lead in the city for TV productions. It’s hard to lose a production like ‘NCIS’, but we are confident that from a financial perspective we will replace this revenue based on the commitments we have for TV shows and feature films, ‘Morton added.

A total of 11 TV series and one film are currently being filmed or prepared to start within the next 30 days, she said.

Declining values ​​seem to have the fate of “NCIS: New Orleans.” By the sixth season, according to reports, averaged 11 million weekly viewers.

But TVLine.com has averaged just 4.8 million viewers for the first eight episodes of this season, and it ranks ninth among the twelve dramas on the CBS schedule.

Most hour-long “NCIS: New Orleans” episodes – the series ends with 155 – follow a similar dramatic arc. A crime or the discovery of a body is followed by a sober assessment of the scene by Bakula’s special agent Pride. His eclectic investigators are working on some high-tech computers and sharing wise cracks and smiles. Veteran actress CCH Pounder’s soft, cold corpse shoulder, dr. Loretta Wade, often performs an autopsy.

Inevitably, the initial suspect turns out to be a red herring and the real culprit – perhaps a foreign assassin, perhaps a murderous archaeologist – is apprehended over time.

“New Orleans is such a great character on the show,” Pounder told Parade magazine in November. ‘The music, the lifestyle, it’s a more relaxed atmosphere, and they still get their husband or wife, eventually anyway. It seems like it really works by highlighting a city that is so spectacularly different from all the other cities in America and unusual. ‘

In a big sixth season turn, special agent Christopher LaSalle, played by actor Lucas Black, was born in Alabama.

Black then attended the controversial, mostly maskless Sean Feucht prayer meeting in the French Quarter on November 7 at which Lauren Daigle sang. The protest sparked outrage from Mayor LaToya Cantrell and many locals.

“I never intended to return here to the French Quarter – it’s not one of my favorite places,” Black said in an Instagram post he told from the perimeter of the crowd.

He may not have taken care of the French Quarter, but it seems other members of the cast are doing just fine.

Pounder, an avid art collector, immersed herself in the city’s visual arts community. She joined the John T. Scott Guild at the Center for Contemporary Arts, was honored in 2016 as the Performing Arts Honor at the CAC’s SweetArts Gala.

Late Wednesday night, Pounder tweeted an article about the cancellation of ‘NCIS: New Orleans’. Five hours later, in an indication that she would not cut her cultural ties with the city any time soon, she tweeted about an upcoming event at the New Orleans African American Museum, along with the message: ‘Treme, old and historic to to renew and reinvent himself! ”

Bakula, an executive producer of the show as well as his star, told the Hollywood Reporter: ‘Sad to end our love affair with this phenomenal city, but so grateful for all the friends we made along the way. I will miss the music. Many thanks to CBS for seven years. ”

Bakula’s character was a music fan, so local musicians appeared regularly on screen. Among the celebrities was a performance of Revivalists at Tipitina.

Local keyboardist John “Papa” Gros presided over his orchestra for a Mardi Gras theme. He performed his original composition “Deep in the Mud”, which earned him license fees and royalties, as well as a performance fee.

“I’m well compensated,” he said. “In my world, it was about as good as it gets.”

The original “NCIS”, itself an effect of the military crime program “JAG”, is now in its 18th season. This led to ‘NCIS: Los Angeles’ and then ‘NCIS: New Orleans’.

The show’s executive producers in New Orleans, Christopher Silber and Jan Nash, are already working on a new spin-off, ‘NCIS: Hawaii’.

Meanwhile, viewers have at least one other option for local crime content.

‘Nightwatch’, an A&E Network documentary series that rides with paramedics in the night shift while responding to all sorts of chaos, will launch its fourth season in New Orleans in March.