Written by on Jul 21, 2014. Posted in On Location

Crime drama NCIS starts filming spinoff show on location in New Orleans

The long-running US crime drama NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service) starts filming its spinoff series NCIS: New Orleans on location in Louisiana this week. Special episodes were shot in New Orleans earlier this year as a pilot of sorts, but much of the studio work was filmed in California.

NCIS has become a massively popular TV show for CBS over the course of an 11-year run and attracts some 20 million viewers a week in the US alone. The drama films in California but is set in Washington, DC, and indeed producers tested the waters earlier this year with the Louisiana setting by spending only a few days actually on location in New Orleans. However, a commitment has since been made to the city.

“When we were doing the initial episodes that we did as part of NCIS, we tried to capture as much iconic imagery as possible,” the drama’s Executive Producer and show-runner Gary Glasberg said during the Television Critics Association Press Tour.

“We hit the landmarks. We jammed as much into those two hours as we could. One of the goals now that we're going to be filming down there full time and spending a tremendous amount of time outside in the city is to dig into those other neighbourhoods, to really get into the flavour and the culture of what New Orleans is.”

Louisiana has become one of the top production centres in the US, partly because of its base 30% filming incentive package. Recent feature productions filming in the state have included Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Terminator 5 and Jurassic World.

(Image: CBS)