YMMV / NCIS: New Orleans

• Anti-Climax Boss: Baitfish, his boss, the mole, and the "storm" coming to New Orleans Baitfish is sniped, his boss is arrested, the mole is arrested, and the "storm" — two terrorists from West Africa who want to bomb a nuclear power plant owned by the same company that destroyed their lives — is quickly quashed.
• Awesome Music: The show's OP "Boom Boom". Originally by John Lee Hooker, the one in the show is done by Big Head Todd & the Monsters.
• Base-Breaking Character: Dwayne Pride is either an interesting, vulnerable and emotional if occasionally reckless team leader, or a Spotlight-Stealing Squad who the series focuses so much on that most other characters get little time to shine on their own. There's some that think he adds a real human element to the series compared to the more professional Gibbs, while others think that Scott Bakula does not make for a rough-and-tough action hero badass sort of character in his age. However you cut it, he is considered the central pillar of either the highlights or the issues with New Orleans as a series.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Russo being a bad guy was pretty obvious from the scene he entered. Knowing things he shouldn't have known only to "not" know it later for whatever reason.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Once again, CGIS Agent Abigail Borin steals the show whenever she makes a guest appearance. And while she appears once a season on the mothership, she's made three appearances, so far, in New Orleans' first season alone.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In "Baitfish", Sasha Broussard (relative of a notorious New Orleans crime family) says she is dissociating herself with her family. Come "More Now", she is revealed to be working with "Baitfish" to expand his empire over the former Broussard empire)
  • LaSalle almost being shot in "Second Line" (the only thing that saved his life is that the criminal's gun jammed) becomes this given his being shot and killed in Season 6.
  • The eponymous Virus X in X is said to be so powerful it could start the next global pandemic. Keep in mind that the episode first aired in 2019...
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Dr. Mitchell Hufcutt in "Carrier" artificially produced the Bubonic Plague to be as lethal as possible in his own medical facilities, and then not only personally spread it on a naval vessel through their mess hall's muffins shortly before it went to New Orleans' port, but intended to go to a convention filled with other medical professionals and infect them all so the plague would spread back to their homes. Unlike most villains, who at least would've done it out of some personal belief or hatred, Hufcutt did this entirely to sell more plague vaccine since his company was primed and ready for profiting the most from it.
  • Douglas Hamilton was always crooked, but he officially crossed this in season 3 when he conspired with Stone to have a neighborhood flooded to build a naval base, having hit squads go out of their way to kill everyone that impedes his path and being directly responsible in funding domestic terrorism. He also personally poisoned an attorney who was trying to stop him, attempts to have the NCIS crew torn up legally, and tries very hard to axe Pride once the man snoops around too much.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Season 3 shows us why Pride really should never hit It's Personal levels of hatred for a single man, and he'll willingly do whatever he needs to shut down Hamilton, including torture, the murder of Hamilton's thugs and associates, and straight up anti-heroic actions that make Gibbs's revenge look tasteful. Season 6 hits this again with Eddie Barrett being such a Complete Monster who earned every bit of Pride's hatred, that once he declares he will go after Pride's loved ones from prison and never let him know peace solely For the Evulz, Pride executed him in cold blood rather than risk that happening.
  • "Pound of Flesh" has the perp harvesting people's organs while they're still awake. We get to see the fresh aftermath of one of his works up close, and as Sebastian and Gregorio figure the victim's dead, he gasps and leans upwards with his opened torso in clear view.
• Questionable Casting: Casting started off good, but they lost the best cast member (Zoe McLellan), and there is a reason why Star Trek: Enterprise bombed: Scott Bakula is not believable as a tough guy. This is not an insult: he is 65 and weighs about 150 pounds.
• Replacement Scrappy:
  • The crux of the problem is that these characters and stories have nothing to do with NCIS. Their "office" is pokey and they are the most slovenly-looking cast. Bakula's and Pounder's accents are hilarious.
  • The decision to replace Brody with Gregorio was a bad one. She is loud and guttural, which caused headaches in viewers. And she dresses like a cocktail waitress. (What kind of Federal agent wears high heeled boots to sprint in?) Even Pride does not seem to care for her. She was added as a rating stunt which backfired.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Sebastian, what with becoming an agent and using his heretofore annoying quirks his advantage. Not to mention his absolutely kicking the ass of a bad guy attacking him and Gregorio.
• The Scrappy:
  • Scott Bakula plays his character as if he always is constipated: pinched, angry face. Pride spends more time tending his dive than actually working.
  • Sebastian is some unholy fusion of Abby from NCIS and Hodgins from Bones, minus the humanity.
  • With the exit of Brody, the show desperately needed a down-to-earth character, and Percy isn't it. She has way too much baggage, no sense of humor, and she's not a team player. Percy is there to jump to conclusions and have a bad attitude.
  • Of the one shot character Replacement Scrappy variety, in "Follow The Money" a CGIS agent is heavily involved in the case, which annoyed the viewers both due to not being Ensemble Dark Horse CGIS Agent Abigail Borin and having a similar appearance and role to Percy yet Percy herself is absent from the episode.
• Seasonal Rot: Common opinion online seems to be that once Season 5's "Angel" becomes a recurring character and Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane became a recurring element with Pride's ongoing trauma and instincts as the series progressed, New Orleans went from a middling spin-off into an irrecoverable decline where solutions and answers could be pulled out of thin air, the Willing Suspension of Disbelief was broken even for Louisiana native viewers that thought it went overboard, and the police procedural elements of the franchise gave way to mostly character spotlight drama. For those that could stick around despite that, things then fell apart for even veteran fans once LaSalle was suddenly Killed Off for Real without any real build-up; the main cast never recovers their momentum afterwards.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The conspiracy against Dwayne Pride that starts with "The Assassination Of Dwayne Pride" and ends season 4. The basis of the whole plot is to discredit and get Pride fired for abuse of power and excessive force that everybody treats as simply the conspiracy trying to destroy him with trumped up charges... by making accusations of things that as any viewer watching the whole show has seen Pride actually DID do and even admits to the team of that fact during the events.
  • The older sister from Season 7 "Into Thin Air": she along with her much older boyfriend come up with a plan to kidnap her younger sister to "protect" her from their father, a Crazy Survivalist. She does so because of the trauma of growing with her father's "insanity" and her mother willing to go share custody with him, believing he's ruining the younger sister's life by homeschooling her, living in the woods, and training her with the father's survival skills. Not only is the sister implied to be more or less well adjusted despite her upbringing and said skills come in handy a couple times, the entire family are enraged by what she's done and her boyfriend is dead because of her younger sister. Furthermore, the big sister is 11 years older making her in her late 20s, old enough that she could've used her father's image to gain custody rather than perform a convoluted plot that nearly got her sister killed.

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