While NCIS doesn’t have nearly as high a body count as shows like Game of Thrones, 24 or The Sopranos, a fair amount of important characters have been killed off on the CBS procedural over the years. The latest of the bunch is Rocky Carroll’s Leon Vance, who was fatally shot in NCIS’s 500th episode last month on the 2026 TV schedule. While showrunner Steven Binder has said that Vance’s death was necessary to remind people of the “real stakes” on NCIS, he also admitted in a recent interview that there are two character deaths he regrets in hindsight, and I completely agree about one of them.
Steven Binder Regrets Killing Off Mike Franks And Diane Sterling
While speaking with Binder, who’s been working on NCIS since the beginning, Variety interviewer Chris Willman asked him if he regretted killing off any characters from years past. Willman then brought up the fan outcry when Mike Franks, Leroy Jethro Gibbs’ mentor played by Muse Watson, died in the Season 8 episode “Swan Song.” Binder responded:
It deprived us… You know, I think back to when Freddie Mercury died, and I thought, “What songs aren’t we going to ever hear now?” And there’s no upside to that one. Mike Franks, when he died, it was an extremely powerful episode. It really gave the audience, again, a taste of the contours of where we really go. But it deprived us of a lot of really good episodes.
Muse Watson debuted as Mike Franks in the final two episodes of NCIS Season 3 and was arguably one of the show’s most important characters in those early years. Sadly, in “Swan Song,” he died fighting Jonas Cobb, a.k.a. the Port-to-Port Killer, though it was revealed in the episode afterwards that Mike was already dying from lung cancer. The second character Steven Binder regrets killing off is Melinda McCraw’s Diane Sterling, the ex-wife of both Gibbs and Joe Spano’s Tobias Fornell, the longest-running NCIS recurring character. Binder continued:
And when Gibbs’s ex-wife, Diane Sterling, was killed, she was absolutely fantastic. We did these episodes with her and Joe Spano playing Special Agent Tobias Fornell and Gibbs; the three of them were just gold. So her death also deprived us of another eight fantastic episodes. That was a real bummer. So, I brought Mike Franks back in a flashback episode. I brought her back in a flashback episode, so we got a little more out of them. But I regret those.
Binder then added that he actually pushed back against having Diane being sniped by Segei Mishnev in the Season 12 episode “Check” when the writers decided on this twist while he was “off working on some other stuff.” However, they ultimately stayed the course, with Binder concluding this portion of the interview by saying:
I was overruled [on Diane’s death]. And I regret that. But I stayed on the show. The real reason I stayed on the show is so I could become the showrunner and get even with them and kill their favorite characters.
As Steven Binder mentioned, Mike Franks and Diane Sterling dying didn’t mean we’d seen the last of them on NCIS. Must Watson went on to reprise Mike Franks seven more times, either in flashback or ghost form, up to Season 15, and Diane appeared as a ghost to Gibbs in the Season 16 episode “Daughters.” And yet…
I Wish Mike Franks Hadn’t Been Killed Off
Even all these years later, I still think it was a mistake to kill off Mike Franks. That’s not to say I expected him to stay alive for many more years, like up until Mark Harmon exited the series in Season 19. But I agree with Steve Binder: as memorable as “Swan Song” is 15 years after it aired, NCIS could have squeezed some other great appearances out of him. He still could have ended up getting lung cancer given all those cigarettes he smoked.
Thankfully, fans are able to follow along with younger versions of Mike Franks and Diane Sterling on NCIS: Origins. Kyle Schmid plays Mike as one of the prequel’s principal characters, and Kathleen Kenny has been recurring as Diane in Season 2 after being introduced in the Season 1 finale. Like NCIS, new Origins episodes air Tuesday nights on CBS and can be streamed later with a Paramount+ subscription.
