Of Abby and Linda: "NCIS," "Blue Bloods" DVDs look at cast changes

The latest seasons of “NCIS” and “Blue Bloods” come to DVD on Aug. 21, and with them comes still more reason to talk about eventful developments on both those shows.

“NCIS: The Fifteenth Season” (24 episodes, six discs) includes the departure of Abby Sciuto (Pauley Perrette), for many the most-loved character on the drama, as well as the killing off of Clayton Reeves (Duane Henry), a relatively new series regular. “Blue Bloods: The Eighth Season” (22 episodes, six discs) begins with references to the between-seasons death of Danny Reagan’s wife Linda (Amy Carlson).

Perrette’s leaving “NCIS,” though announced well in advance, still feels shrouded in mystery. She said at one point that, after being part of the show from the beginning, it was just time to move on; but after she left, she tweeted about “Multiple Physical Assaults” and an unspecified “machine” “keeping me silent, and feeding FALSE stories about me.” Viewers in addition noticed that Abby and Gibbs (Mark Harmon), once so close, suddenly seemed not to be together at all; Abby’s goodbye to Gibbs on the show looked as if the two actors had shot their parts separately.

TheWrap, for one, reported that Perrette confronted Harmon in 2016 over bringing his dog to the set even after the dog bit a crew member, requiring stitches. Perrette had reportedly decided to leave the show before the incident, but the conflict led to the actors working separately (and, per TheWrap, their separate work “edited together in certain scenes”).

It’s not surprising that the fifteenth-season DVD ignores all this. What is surprising is how little attention is paid to Abby’s leaving the show. The DVD extras include a long season-in-review piece, a look at major arc in the season, audio commentaries on two episodes, a Q&A with David McCallum (who plays Ducky) and other elements – even a segment on the challenges of creating a heavy rainstorm on a fragile “NCIS” set.

Abby’s leaving is included in the season in review, but briefly. That’s in contrast to the show’s thirteenth-season DVD, which included the departure of DiNozzo (Michael Weatherly); Weatherly was showcased in an extra highlighting DiNozzo’s best episodes. It feels as if the latest extras talk more about Reeves’s death – explained as a need to get the core NCIS team back down to four members (now Gibbs, McGee, Bishop and Torres) – than about Abby. So you have to feel a chill toward Perrette in the fifteenth-season collection.

“Blue Bloods,” meanwhile, does not answer the lingering question of why Carlson left the show – still not explained by her or anyone else beyond the fact that her contract had ended. The eighth season began after Linda’s death, and Carlson did tell Deadline that she would have liked for viewers to have seen the death “for the fans to have a way to grieve, to move through it” – and that the show did not ask her back to film a death scene.

But the DVD extras certainly make clear the impact Linda, and Carlson, had on the show. Tom Selleck, as New York police commissioner Frank Reagan, Linda’s father-in-law, is among those praising Carlson. Donnie Wahlberg, who plays Danny, says Danny’s mourning the loss of Linda had added impact because “Donnie was also mourning Amy.”

 The season-in-review piece concedes that the show had only two choices with Linda: she has either died or left her family, and the latter made no sense in the context of the character and the show. Handling the death as it did, picking up months after the actual event, is certainly, as Selleck says. “not … a standard television way” of dealing with a key character’s death. But revisiting scenes about Linda’s death, it was certainly led to effective drama. There’s a really interesting dissection of a scene between Danny and his brother Jamie (Will Estes), written as comedy but turned more dramatic in the making.  Even some of the deleted scenes included as DVD extras allude to how people feel after Linda’s passing.

The “Blue Bloods” season in review segment looks at other issues, including the relationship between Jamie and his police partner Eddy Janko (Vanessa Ray), which led to their engagement in the season finale. Also in the extras are a look at the visual effects, a gag reel and – sigh – some TV cross-promotion via the pilot episodes of “SEAL Team” and “Bull.” But the value in the set lies more in the quality of the episodes and the discussion of how a show deals with a major change.