Warning: SPOILERS for the first three NCIS: Tony & Ziva episodes are ahead!
Like my colleague Laura Hurley, I enjoyed watching the first three episodes of NCIS: Tony & Ziva on the 2025 TV schedule, though in my case, it’s as someone who followed along with Tony DiNozzo and Ziva David on NCIS for years. Still, I wasn’t expecting for the Paramount+ subscription-exclusive spinoff’s opening episodes to not only keep flashing forward to a wedding, but one where Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo’s characters aren’t tying the knot. As surprising as it was to see this, I was delighted to learn the origins of this scene directly from de Pablo and Tony & Ziva showrunner John McNamara.
What John McNamara Said About NCIS: Tony & Ziva’s Wedding
This information came to light when I asked McNamara during my interview with him what the collaborative process was like working with Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo as executive producers on NCIS: Tony & Ziva. After discussing how Weatherly came up with the idea for this series to be a “globe-trotting spy thriller,” he then shared the important contribution de Pablo provided when the three of them were cracking the story:
… One particularly Zoom was very memorable because after reading the outline, Cote said, ‘Oh, I had this kind of vision of an opening, and I'm like, ‘Oh what is that?’ She goes, ‘Me in a wedding dress, Tony in a tux. We're in church, fakeout, he’s not the groom.’ And I'm like, ‘That's cool. So what happens?’ She goes, ‘Oh, I don't know. That's your job.’ So everybody kind of stayed in their lanes, but everybody played their part strong. I love that. I thought that was one of the best pitches I've ever heard from an opening.
That’s one hell of a way to grab viewers’ attention right off the bat. John McNamara and the rest of the NCIS: Tony & Ziva writing team later hashed out the specifics, but props to Cote de Pablo for coming up with that. The good new for the Tiva shippers out there is that this wedding is definitely not legit, but rather part of a sting operation set for Nassima Benchicou’s Martine Aranow that requires Ziva to be the bride and Maximilian Osinski’s Boris Peskov to be the groom.
What Cote de Pablo Said About NCIS: Tony & Ziva’s Wedding
So how did Cote de Pablo think of this idea? Chalk it up to some good ol’ social media use. The actress, who last played Ziva David in NCIS Season 17, explained to me:
I think one day I was scrolling through Pinterest or something like that, and I saw this incredible picture of this cliffside Italian villa where a wedding was going on. And I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, this would have been such a beautiful place to get married,’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, well we could totally find ourselves in another marriage situation. And wouldn't it be fun if it was in a place like that?’
After this image appeared in her imagination, de Pablo “went into a little bit of lucid dreaming” and started putting together how it would be interesting to see these characters “had this fake wedding, but most people thought they were getting married, but they're not getting married.” It’s all part of a mission they have to complete, but the audience doesn’t know yet how they got into this strange predicament. Cote de Pablo continued:
All I knew were these sort of flashes of images. And I shared this very vague, abstract idea of this fake wedding going on and where people may think that Tony and Ziva are getting married, but they're not getting married and it's all part of some sort of secret thing. And then John went, ‘Oh my God, I love it.’ And then, of course, you let go of that. You have no idea what's gonna happen. You certainly can ask questions, but at the end of the day, really, it's in [John’s] hands.
The good news is we won’t have to wait much longer to see how this wedding came together. After suffering that major heartbreak with his now-ex-girlfriend Nicole, Tony came up the idea to have Boris and his fiancée, Anne-Marie Waldeck’s Fruzsi Gortva, to go through with their wedding as planned in order to use it as a trap for Martine. The preview for this Thursday’s NCIS: Tony & Ziva episode, titled “Wedding Crashers,” will finally see the events of this faux-matrimonial ceremony unfolding in the present day storyline,
However, it doesn’t look like the plan will go off without a hitch since we see that Ziva will end up chasing after Martine, and Tony will end up fighting the guy who threatened Tali in order to get the 9.4 hacking device. But not to worry, Tiva fans: just because this wedding wasn’t meant for Tony and Ziva doesn’t mean these two won’t get some sort of “happy something” by the time the season’s over.
