A new brief: NCIS star Michael Weatherly returns in a legal-based crime drama.

NCIS star Michael Weatherly talks to Jenny Cooney Carrillo about his latest TV series in which he plays Dr Jason Bull, the founder of a successful trial consulting firm. The role is loosely based on TV talk-show host Dr Phil McGraw.

After 13 years as NCIS’s quirky Tony DiNozzo, Michael Weatherly is talking Bull – his new drama. Based on the early days of trial consultant-turned-talkshow host Dr Phil McGraw, the show follows Dr Jason Bull and his team of experts who use psychology, human intuition and high-tech data to analyse jurors, lawyers, witnesses and defendants in a bid to keep their clients out of jail. “I think Tony DiNozzo was a maverick in his own way, but I think Bull is a lot more outside the box,” Weatherly says. “Five days ago I went to work and Bull woke up in a field in his underwear next to a cow. I never expected that that would be what I would be doing as Dr Bull, but he is a very surprising character. “He seems to be almost a con man sometimes. And then he turns around and helps people in the most beautiful way and he seems to be selfless and magical. So I’m really looking forward to exploring Bull for many, many seasons to come.” While the drama is inspired by Dr McGraw’s work in trial sciences, it is fiction. “I think early on there was this understanding that the show was about Dr Phil but what it’s actually about is the world (he) came from and has a great understanding of – trial sciences. But the important distinction is that Dr Jason Bull is very different as a human being in terms of background and education and everything than Phil McGraw, so I never had to worry about trying to be Dr Phil because that wasn’t really the character.” However, McGraw (an executive producer on Bull) has become a mentor to the actor.

“What I talked to Phil McGraw about a great deal, is what that world is like,” says Weatherly.

“How do you get a witness to understand that the way they’re going about presenting their version of what happened is not going to fly with the jury? How do you prepare a defendant who refuses to cut their hair when you’re basically saying, ‘Look, if you don’t get a haircut, they’re going to find you guilty’,” he says.

“Phil was incredibly helpful in understanding and revealing a lot of secrets that I can’t tell you. And I continue to learn a lot from McGraw. I call him pragmagical. He’s pragmatic and he’s magical.”

Weatherly says he has learnt a lot from the show and he believes viewers will too.

“The big hook for Bull is plain and simple – understanding human behaviour a little bit better. The field of psychology has, over the last 100-odd years, sort of exploded.

“Now people are able to talk about things that, you know, 20, 30 years ago were considered, horrible secrets,” he says.

“Nobody has that expectation of privacy any more. Every time you do a search in a search engine, there’s a company that knows what you search for and if you have a subscription to a newspaper online, suddenly all of the advertising is curated and targeted just to you.

“So you start to live in a world where all of the selections that you’ve made in your life start to reflect back at you. And this is the first time in history that that’s really been the case. And it’s changing people a little bit.”

The actor says while he’s resisted using his newfound profiling knowledge on those around him, he has picked up a few little tricks.

“I did solve a panic attack the other day with my daughter. She had cut her lip and we were on our way to the hospital and she was bleeding quite a bit and was really freaked out,” Weatherly says.

“We had a scene where a woman was having a panic attack and Bull says to her, ‘You know, the brain doesn’t like to freak out and count out of sequence at the same time’.

“So what I did with my daughter is I counted. I said ‘4,5, 6, 3, 1, 7’ and she said, what? And I said ‘3, 4, 5,8, 11, 2’. And she stopped crying. It was an extraordinary thing.

“I feel like I learned something incredibly useful. And that, you know, if the show can leave everybody with one piece of information like that every week then we’ve done a great job.”

“Nobody has that expectation of privacy any more. Every time you do a search in a search engine, there’s a company that knows what you search for and if you have a subscription to a newspaper online, suddenly all of the advertising is curated and targeted just to you.” – Michael Weatherly