Why Sasha Alexander’s Kate Todd Left NCIS

“NCIS” is still trucking along on CBS. By now, though, the naval crimes procedural has been on the air for so long that it’s already got its own rewatch podcast. “Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch” is co-hosted by Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo, two of the show’s main stars who (along with Mark Harmon and Pauley Perrette) both eventually left after spending several years playing their respective roles. 

Unlike most rewatch podcasts, however, “Off Duty” doesn’t layer on the excessive nostalgia, which makes sense given the allegedly tough working conditions that several “NCIS” cast members have spoken about. Case in point: there’s an episode where the two hosts dig into the apparently exhausting early seasons with former star Sasha Alexander, whose Special Agent Caitlin Todd was killed off after just two seasons of “NCIS.”

Alexander was with “NCIS” from the start. She played Agent Todd in the early backdoor pilot episodes of “JAG” before moving over to the new series with fellow leads Harmon and Weatherly. The actor appeared in nearly 50 episodes of the show before Kate faced a dramatic fate in the season 2 finale. By the end of the episode, titled “Twilight,” Kate had been shot in the head by Ari (Rudolph Martin), a Mossad agent whom her colleagues spent the next two episodes chasing down in an emotional attempt to avenge her surprise death. 

Behind the scenes, on the other hand, Alexander’s exit was perhaps less of a surprise. In the years since then, she’s revealed that she was burnt out by the show’s intensive production schedule.

Back when Alexander exited “NCIS,” series co-creator Donald P. Bellisario attributed her departure to issues related to her stamina. “I had already started writing the last episode of the season and was getting ready to go to Australia to take a little break,” Bellisario told the Chicago Tribune in 2005. “Sasha came in two days before I was to leave, and with tears in her eyes, she said, ‘I just can’t work this hard.'” But while Bellisario sounds forgiving in the interview, he didn’t mention any attempts at reforming the schedule to avoid future burnout — something that was unfortunately customary for network shows at the time.

“We work very long hours, and Sasha just didn’t feel she was physically up to that kind of time and commitment,” Bellisario added. “Although we had her under contract, I went to CBS and said, ‘You don’t want to force someone to work when she says this is not what she expected it to be.'” He concluded, “I think it was just more than she realized.” This was pretty much the end of the conversation back then, and cast members’ attempts to address unhealthy work schedules continued to be mostly ignored for a decade to come. The rare exceptions to that rule tended to turn out badly as well, like when Katherine Heigl was shunned by the movie and TV industry at large for publicly calling out the “cruel” 17-hour-workdays on “Grey’s Anatomy” in 2009.

Thankfully, labor movements, investigative works like Maureen Ryan’s book “Burn it Down,” and world events have since clarified the public’s understanding that Hollywood sets are a workplace like any other — and that studios, networks, and directors need to provide the same level of protections for employees as any other boss. In 2022, years after her costar’s ousting, “Grey’s Anatomy” actor Ellen Pompeo called Heigl a “complete hero” for speaking out about the “insane hours” on the show (per TVLine). There seems to be a similarly liberated vibe to the “NCIS” podcast, where de Pablo, Weatherly, and Alexander have been pretty candid about the chaos and strain behind the scenes of the massively popular series.

“I had done a few shows before ‘NCIS’ but none as challenging,” Alexander told de Pablo and Weatherly in a June 2024 episode, adding that it wasn’t just the long hours that got to her, but also some issues with writing deadlines. “We didn’t have full scripts early on, we had acts,” she explained. Weatherly agreed, comparing the early seasons of the show to a game of 52 pickup (“a mess”) and recalling the series’ penchant for making all three lead actors appear in every scene — whether it made sense for the story or not. Sometimes, he said, extras who had already wrapped their scenes would suddenly be promoted to the episode’s villain, leading to additional sequences that didn’t make sense to the cast and put a lot of pressure on those extras (some of whom had barely had speaking roles before, according to Weatherly).

The disarray behind the scenes would be enough to tire anyone out. Of course, as Alexander and Weatherly noted, it didn’t help that “no one” had a life outside of their work at that point in the show. The lack of work-life balance surrounding the CBS procedural influenced the roles Alexander would choose next, including a lead turn on TNT’s “Rizzoli & Isles.” As she explained to de Pablo:

“I think before ‘NCIS,’ the shows that I did somehow had more of a balance like they were either true ensembles. I mean normally, if you’re like a one or two [on the call sheet], like ‘Rizzoli and Isles,’ I worked all the time. But there were moments where we could throw the ball back and forth to each other. ‘NCIS,’ Mark, Michael, and I — and you later — were in every single scene.”

Alexander was already speaking up about the toll of dangerously long network shooting days before the world was ready to hear about it. “People don’t realize that on a network show, you make 24 episodes a year — that’s 10½ months a year, 17 hours a day,” she told TV Guide back in 2012. “It’s hardcore.” Even though she told the outlet that “people don’t understand” her choice to exit a steady job like the one she had at “NCIS,” she has no regrets. “I really firmly believe in my heart that I would not be where I am today — happily married, with two kids, doing things creatively that I want — if I had stayed,” Alexander added.

As for the actor who took over for her when she left? On “Off Duty,” de Pablo recalled Alexander gently touching her face the first time they met and giving her some simple advice that stayed with her for years: “Be strong.” De Pablo hasn’t appeared on the show since 2020, but she’s set to reunite with Weatherly for an upcoming sequel series titled “NCIS: Tony & Ziva.”