NCIS, season 1

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service works any death that touches the Navy or Marine Corps, and Leroy Jethro Gibbs runs its major case team on coffee, head-slaps and a numbered code of rules nobody has seen written down. Tony DiNozzo is his senior field agent, all movie quotes and better instincts than he advertises; Kate Todd comes over from the Secret Service in the premiere after her old job and her principles collide; Abby Sciuto runs forensics on Caf-Pow and goth cheer, and Dr. 'Ducky' Mallard talks to the dead while he works them.

The year is casework - terrorists on carriers, deaths on shore leave, a serial case or two - and the show's texture is procedure with family dynamics grafted on.

Its arc arrives late and quietly: Ari Haswari, a smiling man found holding the morgue at gunpoint, who shoots Gibbs, escapes, and turns out to be threaded into al-Qaeda's interest in the Navy at a level nobody can pin down. Mossad claims him as their deep-cover asset; Gibbs does not believe a word of it, and the season closes their first exchange with the question deliberately open - and with Gibbs' cold certainty that the man will need killing eventually.