Buddy cop genre lives on with 'NCIS'

“You never know. If we go undercover in a club and gotta shake it up a little, and Chris has to put his Flavor Flav clock on, I'm sure he'll do it,” LL Cool J said. “They have a clock ready for him.”

“When is Flav coming on the show?” O'Donnell said, responding in kind. “Every time his (LL Cool J's) phone rings, I say, `Seriously, man, is that Hammer?' It's so funny, because the names I throw out are from 15 years ago.”

Men bonding as they fight crime is a TV staple, but one that was eclipsed in recent years as ensemble series including “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and its spinoffs dominated. On “NCIS,” the quietly authoritative Mark Harmon rules his colorful subordinates.

(Other buddy crime shows, like freshman “White Collar,” fail to meet the mandatory genre requirement of two men of equal law-enforcement status.)

The “NCIS” spinoff, which features Oscar-winning actress Linda Hunt, needed to go in a different direction from the original, said executive producer Shane Brennan. Until he saw O'Donnell and LL Cool J as undercover special agents G. Callen and Sam Hanna, however, he wasn't sure if the pairing would work -- and it did, immediately, he said.

LL Cool J offers a theory why.

“I think Chris and I, we complement each other in many ways,” he said. “Forget the obvious visual differences; culturally, we're so different, him being from the northern Chicago suburbs, me being from Queens, N.Y.,” he said. “It's a cosmopolitan city, Midwestern kind of guy coming together on this show, so we see things so differently because of that.”

“The hybrid vision, so to speak, is really cool,” he added.

O'Donnell frames the contrast differently.

“Todd is one of the great optimists of our time. I tend to be a little more pessimistic. It's a great combo,” he said -- and one he hopes will prove memorable.

The genre has produced “great teams along the way,” O'Donnell said, and he's hoping his partnership with LL Cool J is counted as one.

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