Take A Peek At Tonight’s ‘NCIS:LA’ Premiere

The seventh season of NCIS: Los Angeles gets underway tonight with “Active Measures” at 9:59pm ET/PT. You can watch the first of three sneak peeks below, featuring Sam Hanna (LL Cool J), Owen Granger (Miguel Ferrer), Marty Deeks (Eric Christian Olsen) and Kensi Blye (Daniela Ruah). (You can also watch it on CBS.com, CBS Press Express and SpoilerTV.)

Clip number two features Granger, Sam, Deeks, Kensi, G Callen (Chris O’Donnell), Hetty Lange (Linda Hunt), Nell Jones (Renée Felice Smith) and Eric Beale (Barrett Foa). (It can also be found on CBS.com, CBS Press Express and SpoilerTV.)

And here’s scene number three, which features Sam and Callen. (You can also find it on CBS.com, CBS Press Express and SpoilerTV.)

CBS also shared this red carpet interview from PaleyFest, featuring O’Donnell, LL Cool J, Foa, Smith, Ruah, Hunt, Ferrer and Olsen. In it, they discuss what’s coming up this season on NCIS: LA, including tonight’s premiere. (It’s also available on CBS.com.)

Executive Producer Shane Brennan spoke to the Hollywood Reporter about the start of season seven, and here’s an excerpt about the premiere:

The finale concluded with the audience learning that Callen’s father is indeed still alive, unbeknownst to Callen. How soon after that will things pick up in the premiere?

We begin three months later, and Callen has started to act rather strangely. He’s off doing something — he doesn’t want to involve Sam, he doesn’t want to involve Hetty (Linda Hunt), and they begin to get very concerned about what he is doing. As a result, it puts him in a pretty difficult situation with Hetty and Sam in particular, but also for the rest of the team. We’ve seen these guys go off the grid before, but this one is much more personal for Callen. As a result, it puts him off side with Hetty, who takes some rather drastic action to try and corral him; she ends up tasering him.

Brennan also spoke to TV Line about season seven, including this quote about Callen:

TVLINE | Oh, I’m sure that once his motivation is revealed, they’ll all hug it out.

It’s revealed, but it’s not resolved. In the great tradition of this show we plant the seeds of something to come, and it has a fairly major impact halfway through the season, in a pretty large double episode. Look, this is going to be a really fascinating season. We’ve got it all mapped out and we have so much story [that] it is like two normal seasons — and that’s saying something, because this show doesn’t tend to dawdle, it doesn’t tend to go slow. We always have our foot on the accelerator, but this season is jam-packed.

And here’s an excerpt from TV Guide, which goes into a bit more detail about Callen’s storyline in the premiere:

1. Callen becomes a target Much of Season 7’s focus will be on Callen’s (Chris O’Donnell) search for answers regarding his family, after the reveal at the end of Season 6 that his father is actually alive. “Perhaps there’s opportunity to get closure on his life and his background,” Brennan says. “There’s still a chapter there to be written for Callen. And we will continue to write that chapter this season.”

But he’ll also have bigger problems to deal with. The premiere, which picks up three months after the end of Season 6, finds Callen at odds with the entire team after he goes rogue on an assignment and becomes entangled with both the CIA and a group of Russian criminals. Before long, his colleagues are tasked with targeting one of their own. “We’ve never seen Sam or Hetty in this position with Callen before. We’ve had situations where he’s gone off the grid, but there’s some pretty interesting conversations between Callen and Hetty and Callen and Sam about loyalty and being informed about what’s happening,” Brennan says. “It is tied into all of the things that the fans of the show know about Callen – and Hetty and Sam for that matter, too.” The information Callen uncovers that sends him off on his own also sets up a midseason event that will have major repercussions for the show going forward, Brennan teases.

LL Cool J spoke to Yahoo about the new season, and here’s a quote about one of the sneak peeks above:

What’s your favorite scene from the premiere? And is there a particular kind of scene you look forward to in general?

I thought the scene where Sam Hanna confronts Callen — it’s in the middle of the night, he confronts Callen about what’s going on, why you acting like this? — it’s a good scene. [Sam]’s tracking him, he’s watching him, they end up drawing weapons and things ensue.

I like scenes where two characters can actually communicate. They either have a problem that they need to solve, or they’re trying to become closer to one another, but they’re communicating. I love those kinds of scenes as opposed to exposition. But the writers are very good about even the exposition being designed in a way that clarifies things for the audience but keeps the actors engaged.

LL Cool J also did a brief interview with Entertainment Weekly. When asked how the premiere storyline would affect the team’s dynamic during the rest of the season, he said: “That remains to be seen. But it definitely derails things for this episode and for some more episodes to follow.”

Nancy O’Dell did a livestream with LL Cool J today, including questions about “Active Measures”. You can watch the video here, and check out several photos below featuring LL Cool J with O’Dell and on the set of Entertainment Tonight:

Finally, check out these tweets and photos relating to the premiere, including a live chat during the East Coast airing:

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