Friday Night TV Murder Pile: Aloha, NCIS: Hawai’i

When we recently started codifying the concept of the Friday Night TV Murder Pile—the Hollywood trend that sees TV networks dump the news that they’re canceling modestly performing “bubble” shows in the last hours before the weekend, presumably to cut down on the shouting—it was mostly as a joke. “Certainly,” we thought at the time, “The networks won’t continue to kill series at this particular time of week, every week, so consistently that we’d have to keep doing this.”

Anyway, CBS killed NCIS: Hawai’i tonight, marking its second week in a row making a deposit on the FNTVMP. (Last week saw the network kill off fellow procedural CSI: Vegas, plus private investigator series So Help Me Todd.) NCIS, which stars Vanessa Lachey, is currently in the midst of its third season, which will now also be its last season, and is now the third NCIS show to fall. (Los Angeles went in 2023; New Orleans back in 2021.)

As per Murder Pile tradition (and per Variety), CBS doesn’t appear to have issued any kind of “we’re sorry to see you go” obituary for the series, which was actually projected to survive this most recent wave of bloodletting. (It was the last show on CBS’s schedule that was still facing the axe, after Young Sheldon, Bob Hearts Abishola, and Blue Bloods also got cut.) Deadline reports that the show’s May 6 finale wasn’t written to serve as a series finale, and that producers were even offering to make “massive” budget cuts to get a truncated fourth season to finish things out, but, well: Here we are.

In addition to Lachey, Hawai’i also starred Alex Tarrant, Noah Mills, Yasmine Al-Bustami, Jason Antoon, and Tori Anderson. The series is survived by NCIS: Sydney, plus the original NCIS, as well as multiple franchise spin-offs still actively in development.