CBS’ “NCIS” seems to be the show that will not die. The original has spewed more colorful offspring than the Easter Bunny: “NCIS: New Orleans,” “Los Angeles,” “Hawai’i,” “Sydney.” And now “NCIS: Origins” premiers next Monday.

“Origins” is what it sounds like — a time-travel back to when Leroy Jethro Gibbs was a young special agent new to the Naval Investigative Service (precursor to NCIS) at California’s Camp Pendleton.

The show stars Austin Stowell as the fledgling Gibbs with the series’ original Gibbs, Mark Harmon, narrating and serving as executive producer.

Showrunners on the newcomer “Origins” are David J. North and Gina Lucita Monreal, both of whom worked on the original with Harmon. But Harmon left the show three years ago. Today he says, “I was always of the opinion that this show would carry on, no matter who left or who joined. So the fact that this show now comes out of the grass with these two (writers) which were, in my opinion, the best writer-creators that ever came through that footpath, there was just an opportunity there.”

The idea for the new spinoff wasn’t Harmon’s. It was his 36-year-old son Sean’s, who had acted in seven episodes of the original.

According to Sean, the idea hit like a bolt of lightning. “We were shooting episode 400 of ‘NCIS,’ the original show,” he recalls.

“When exploring this role, something my dad has always talked about, about the Gibbs character himself ... as a guy who's got something broken inside, a guy who at one point in his life is very much at risk of going down a much darker path.

“And what about this job (at NCIS) made that choice different? Kind of a more honorable path as opposed to one of oblivion. And that got me thinking because I got to portray him, obviously, as the bright and bushy-tailed young Marine who nothing horrible had happened to yet,” he says.

“And the man you all know from the mother ship series is essentially a guy who's had 30 years to kind of come to terms with some serious trauma. But that guy in the middle, I think personally, is a very, very interesting character,” he says.

“It's a guy with none of the answers and all of the trauma. And it kind of just got the wheels turning as to what could this be? And once you do the math and you see that it kind of puts you at the early '90s which is a time period close to — most of my musical choices are from that (period). ...

“It just started to take shape. And then, obviously, I put together a pitch and talked to my dad, and then I'll never forget coming into the kitchen, and he was holding out a phone. And I was like, ‘Who's on that?’ And he was like, ‘David North.’ I talked to David, and now here we are. And I just couldn’t be more excited and can't wait to share ... what we've been working on because we're excited.”

The younger Harmon couldn’t be more stoked than actor Stowell, who says he didn’t get to meet the elder Harmon before his audition. “I was going off of what was on the page,” he recalls.

“I had this incredible roadmap in front of me that David and Gina had written. There were these really rich complex scenes that I was able to dive into. This is a Gibbs that is dealing with the loss of his wife and child. This is not the Gibbs that you know, that the world knows right now that's the team leader who's always so put together.

“This is somebody who's broken,” Stowell explains. “This is somebody who's searching for his identity, trying to find himself and ground himself back in the world. And so it wasn't until I got in the room for my screen test that Mark came up to me and said two words that I'll remember forever, and he just said, ‘Trust yourself.’”

As executive producer and narrator, Mark Harmon is not disappearing — he’s just easing into the background. “I’m not someone overly concerned about what people think about what I did or am doing,” he says. “No one's harder on me than I am. I generally know when I hit it or when I don’t. ... It's really about longevity in a field not known for that, and about reputation which is most important for me than anything.”

Travis Kelce tackles TV

Travis Kelce is showing up everywhere on television, including the Prime Video game show “Are You Smarter than a Celebrity?” as wells as commercials and Ryan Murphy’s new spooky series, “Grotesquerie,” streaming now on Hulu.

Murphy explains how he blocked the tight end for his 10-part horror series.

“I had a general meeting with Travis Kelce. He liked my work and he said he was interested in getting into acting. We were just talking about that and his future and his interest and what does he want to do during the football season, after football season, and I was just kind of giving him some, I guess, fatherly advice.

“I always have a motto in my world and in my work that a star is a star is a star. It doesn’t matter what field you’re a star in — if you have that charisma, you are going to bring it to whatever you do. So it was a very lovely meeting and it ended with me saying, ‘Well, I’ll keep you in mind and maybe we’ll come up with something.’ And he said, ‘No, I want to do it now. I have three months now and I really would love — do you have anything?’ And I was thinking, and we were just starting to get in the preproduction of ‘Grostesquerie,’ and I said, ‘Well, I have this one part, and if you’re interested, I will specifically write it and tailor it for you.’ And he said, ‘I would love that.’

“So we were off to the races. ... I directed the first episode he did with Niecy (Nash-Betts), and Niecy and I just instantly loved him and took him by the hand and let him know that he would not, could not fail, and he really was amazing.”

Kelce had worked with an acting coach and Murphy recalls, “He showed up off-book. He knew everybody’s lines. He was so professional. He was so committed. He kept saying to me, ‘I’m real coachable — coach me, coach me.’ So I did, and he ended up being a delight. And I would love to continue working with him on this and other things. I cannot say enough about him as a leader. He’s just the kindest, sweetest, everything you think about him is true.”

Ex-con Danny Trejo plays parolee

Tough guy Danny Trejo, a veteran of such shows as “Sons of Anarchy,” “King of the Hill,” “Breaking Bad,” and “The Flash,” plays a parolee in the new horror film “Se7en Cemeteries,” arriving on-demand and in theaters Friday.

Trejo tells me his first experience on a set was when he was working for Cocaine Anonymous and received a phone call one night at 11 p.m.

“This guy wanted to stay clean — that was the magic word,” he says. “So he asked me if I’d come down and support him. He gave me the address. I went down where his job was — it was the movie set of ‘Runaway Train,'’’ he remembers.

“I thought it was cutest thing I’d ever seen. All these guys were dressed in prison clothes, and they've got these big tattoos, and they were, yeah, tougher than you. It was just cute. This guy asked me if I wanted to be in the movies.

"I said, ‘What do I do?’ He said, ‘You want to be an extra?’ I said, ‘An extra what?’ I didn’t know what an extra was. I’d never been on a movie set before.

“He said, ‘Can you act like a convict?’ It was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. I’d been in Soledad, San Quentin, Folsom, Vacaville, Susanville, Sierra and here's a guy asking, ‘Can you act like a convict?’ I remember I said, ‘I’ll give it a shot.’”

Atwell voices Lara Croft

British-American actress Hayley Atwell provides the voice of the globetrotting Lara Croft in the animated “Tomb Raider: the Legend of Lara Croft,” which hits Netflix on Thursday. The talented Atwell, who’s starred in such projects as “Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning,” “Captain America: the First Avenger,” “Agent Carter” and “Black Mirror,” says she was inspired by the theater work of Helen Mirren and Judy Dench.

“I loved the escapism, telling stories. But I also loved the ability the stories have to help us process very difficult human things,” she says.

“Through storytelling it can be a soft landing pad to facing up to certain things which in other words we wouldn’t necessarily have the vocabulary for. If we can see it played out in other people’s lives, we feel less alone. So there was something about the connection between an audience member and the storyteller that I thought that was a worthy thing to dedicate your life to.”

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