NCIS, season 21

The strike-shortened year opens with the phone call the audience already dreaded: Dr. Donald Mallard, medical examiner turned historian, gone quietly - the show folding David McCallum's real death into its world with the tribute hour it owed him. The episode is built from the team settling his unfinished business, and it is the franchise's best pure grief writing: Jimmy Palmer, the student who became the successor, carrying the heaviest of it.

The short season runs its ten hours close to home. Parker's past gets its own file, the casework leans personal, and the Knight-and-Palmer relationship - new, careful, both of them widowed by the job in different ways - is played as the year's through-line rather than its subplot.

It ends on a ship: Knight and Parker trapped aboard with a killer as the vessel is towed out for demolition, the team racing the tide - and, on the far side of the rescue, the cost. Vance offers Knight the REACT training command in California; she takes it; and Palmer, asked for patience, chooses a clean break instead. The season closes with the job won and the couple lost.