NCIS: Origins Adds a Mike Franks Companion Series Before Season 3

Kyle Schmid is answering fan mail as Mike Franks. Actual fan mail. The kind with stamps.

Ahead of the season 3 premiere of NCIS: Origins, the show is putting out a companion series built around one of its main characters, and the format is stranger than a standard behind-the-scenes package.

In a video posted on Instagram, Schmid, in character as Mike, says he’s been getting mail over the last several weeks asking for advice. Not everyone has, as Mike puts it, “a real man in their life to talk to,” so he’s launching an advice show called Let’s Talk Frank, where people can ask him for “tips about life.”

Here’s the catch. Questions don’t go in a DM or a comment thread. Fans have to write them out and mail them to the address shown in the video and in the post’s caption.

Who Mike Franks is, and why he gets his own show

NCIS: Origins is the franchise’s first prequel, tracking Leroy Jethro Gibbs’ start at the agency in the early 1990s. Schmid’s Franks is the one who recruited Stowell’s Gibbs into what was then called NIS, after the murder of Gibbs’ wife and daughter.

Franks sticks around in season 3. But he’s also getting the spotlight online through this newly announced companion series, which hands Schmid another place to play the character’s Texan charm and his particular read on how life works.

How long it runs is an open question. It’s unclear whether Let’s Talk Frank is a pre-premiere thing only, or whether it continues into season 3 and past it.

The cameo at the end says a lot

Tyla Abercrumbie turns up at the end of the video as Mary Jo Hayes. That’s a hint other Origins regulars could show up in future Let’s Talk Frank episodes too.

Franks has history well beyond this prequel. Muse Watson played him in the original NCIS, where the character kept coming out of retirement to help the Washington D.C. team led by Gibbs, played there by Mark Harmon.

Mike died in the season 8 episode “Swan Song.” That didn’t stop him. Watson came back for a handful of later episodes through flashbacks and as a ghost or vision.

Watson also returned briefly last year, in the Origins episode “Funny How Time Slips Away,” for an aging scene in which Schmid’s Mike morphs into his older self.

What season 3 has to clean up

The season 2 finale left two threads dangling. Gibbs and Mariel Molino’s Cecilia “Lala” Dominguez kissed for the first time, and Caleb Foote’s Bernard “Randy” Randolf was kidnapped over something connected to the NCIS case files he’s been digitizing.

Harmon, who executive produces and narrates Origins, is stepping in front of the camera. He’ll appear on screen for the entirety of season 3 in a present-day storyline.

And the season is shorter. Season 3 has been confirmed at 10 episodes, down from the 18 each of the first two seasons carried.

When to watch

NCIS: Origins season 3 premieres Tuesday, October 6 at 9 p.m. ET on CBS. NCIS season 24 and the new spinoff NCIS: New York premiere the same night.

Every show in the NCIS-verse streams on Paramount+.

Until then, there’s a mailbox somewhere with Mike Franks’ name on it, waiting on your handwriting.