The Real Reason Sasha Alexander Left NCIS After Season 2
By Robert King
We know the NCIS team works long hours to catch the bad guys, but the people who make the show are also pulling very long shifts, purely in the name of entertainment.
This detail slipped by fans, who were so furious when Todd was killed off that show creator Don Bellisario weighed in on what happened behind the scenes. (The untold truth of NCIS is that Bellisario would soon quit the show he helped bring to life, partly because of a rift with Harmon.) He explained that he'd already started working on the script for the last episode of the season — and was actually planning to have a break in Australia — when Alexander begged him to write her out of the show.
In July 2005, a couple of months after Todd's dramatic death aired, Bellisario shed some light on the situation in a conversation with the Chicago Tribune. "Sasha came in two days before I was to leave, and with tears in her eyes, she said, 'I just can't work this hard.'" The showrunner admitted that NCIS is "a hard show to make. We work very long hours," and added that although Alexander was technically under contract to CBS, he persuaded the network's brass to let her go.
While Bellisario and Alexander knew what was coming, no one else knew about her departure. Fans got wind that one of the NCIS team was going to die in the season two finale. But exactly who it would be was kept so secret that they even shot an alternate ending where Todd survived, with some of the footage eventually used in Gibbs' alternate reality fantasy.
