Abby Sciuto

Prior to taking up a career in acting, Pauley Perrette had studied at John Jay School of Criminal Science in New York, having previously aspired "to work with animals, be in a rock 'n' roll band, or be an FBI agent."[6] She eventually began acting, later saying "There's no drug that I ever did that worked as well as being an actor. What you're looking for with substance abuse is escape. But with acting, you can escape into 1,000 different things without almost killing yourself doing it. Acting is a total drug!"[6]

Perrette was cast for the role of Abby Sciuto in 2003. On the subject of her character's creation and its purpose, she said "[NCIS creator] Don Bellisario told me that when he created Magnum, P.I. he wanted to introduce a Vietnam vet who defied the negative stereotype. So with Abby, he wanted to take an alternative-style person with tattoos and make her someone who is happy, totally put together and successful. All the script said about her was: black hair, caffeinated and smart...She's completely unaware that anybody thinks she looks weird. She thinks she looks pretty and never calls herself anything other than happy. And I fight for that."[7]

Child actress Brighton Sharbino was cast to portray 10-year-old Abby for the season 10 episode "Hit and Run", which featured several flashbacks to a young Abby. Sharbino, who strongly resembled Perrette, reportedly spent time with the latter "in part to pick up on the NCIS vet's mannerisms and such."[1]

Abby is portrayed as having a gothic style of dress,[1] including black dresses and T-shirts, miniskirts, and goth jewelry, including anklets and toe rings. She wears pigtailed dyed hair (due to Perrette's hair being dyed as she is a natural blonde[7]) and has at least nine tattoos on her neck, arms, back, ankle, and other places.[7] Her neck choker appears to be one of her favorite pieces of jewelry. While some of the tattoos are Perrette's and real, others are makeup, such as the large cross on her back applied on occasions when Perrette shows her bare back on camera.[8] The spider web on her neck is not real, either, as producer Bellisario wanted the character to have a tattoo that would be visible (almost) all the time. However, Perrette has expressed dislike for the spider tattoo, saying, "It only takes a few minutes to do, but it feels like old chewing gum,"[7] and had wished for an episode where her character Abby would have it removed.[8] Other character quirks include Abby having a stuffed hippo named "Bert" that makes flatulent/farting noises when squeezed, which has been used for comic effect when Abby is upset.[5] She decorates some of the areas in her lab with toys such as "Bleeding Edge Goth" dolls and "Teddy Scares". The Teddy Scare 'Rita Mortis' can be seen sitting next to her computer monitor. Abby's biggest pet peeve, as revealed in season five's "Lost and Found" by Timothy McGee, is people who claim to be vegetarians, but still eat chicken; her second-biggest pet peeve is people who mishandle evidence.[9]

Pauley Perrette commented, "Don (Bellisario) wanted to do Abby as an alternative-lifestyle person, but not as a junkie or a thief. She might be the smartest person on television."[10] When asked about her depiction of a goth character, she responded that Abby "wouldn't call herself anything but Abby...What she represents is a smart, capable chick that cannot be reduced to a stereotype."[11]

Abby drives a candy-apple red 1930/31 Ford Model A coupe bearing a Washington, DC, personalized vanity plate "4NS CHIK" which is prominently featured in season five's "Dog Tags".[12] She previously drove a hearse (mentioned in "Hiatus, Part I"), which ran poorly and had bald tires.

Abby's signature "Caf-Pow"

Like Gibbs, Abby enjoys caffeine,[7] primarily in the form of large cups of a fictional drink called "Caf-Pow". At times, when she is worried about the caffeine interfering with her sleep, she drinks "No-Caf-Pow" instead. (According to Perrette, the cups were originally filled with Hawaiian Punch, but when she stopped eating and drinking refined sugar, unsweetened cranberry juice was used in its place.)[13] When changing the artwork in her lab during "Hung Out to Dry", she states that she has a "Chagall feeling", a reference to Marc Chagall, a Jewish Belarusian artist whose main works came from fantasy and dreams. Her favorite term for something out of the ordinary is "hinky". It is also shown that she enjoys attending concerts, but her failure to wear earplugs at one of them left her with temporary hearing loss the next day, forcing her to ask DiNozzo for help analyzing some audio evidence.[14]

Abby has shown a tendency to become very agitated, to the point of near-panic, if any of the team is seriously hurt. When Gibbs was admitted to the hospital, Abby ended up on the verge of a nervous breakdown, pacing back and forth while delivering a rambling, disjointed stream-of-consciousness plea that explained (among other things) how close Gibbs and she were, the reason she was arriving after visiting hours, how she felt about Gibbs being injured, and how important it was to her that Gibbs not die from his injuries.

Abby developed a fondness for Butch, a Navy sniffer dog, in the season five episode "Dog Tags". She renamed it "Jethro" in honor of Gibbs, because it was "handsome and quiet" like him. The dog was framed for the murder of a petty officer, as the dog was found at the murder victim's house, but Abby proved Jethro's innocence. Afterwards, Abby forced McGee to adopt the dog, much to his dismay (as Jethro had attacked him earlier in the episode). Abby would have preferred to adopt Jethro herself, but her landlord did not allow tenants to have pets.

Sciuto is portrayed as having a happy, normal childhood. Her younger brother, Luca, was first mentioned by name in the season-nine episode "Enemy on the Hill".[15] He appears in season 10 in a flashback.[16] Luca was portrayed by Tyler Ritter in Season 13 NCIS: New Orleans crossover episodes "Sister City (Part I)" and "Sister City (Part II)". She also mentioned that she has a niece[17] and that her grandmother was an Olympic swimmer who won a silver medal.[18] She has mentioned several uncles, including one named Teddy who owned a bar,[19] one named Horace whom she referred to as Horace "the Haggler" during an episode, and one named Larry who apparently wore knee-high socks and fanny packs. Both her parents are deceased, although when they passed is never mentioned.

"Bert", Abby's stuffed hippo that often provides a running gag by farting when squeezed

Abby is a hearing child adopted by deaf parents[20] and likes her music loud. In the episode "Seadog", Gibbs tells Tony that Abby knows how to use sign language because both of her parents were deaf. Abby has stated that she dreams of visiting the Galápagos Islands, Dollywood, and Israel before she dies.[21] Abby graduated with full honors from Louisiana State University with a triple major in sociology, criminology, and psychology. She earned her master's degree from Georgia State University in criminology and forensic science. Sciuto's interest in forensics came from living near a wrecking yard and being intrigued by the cause and effect of the wrecks.[21][22] The season nine episode "Enemy on the Hill" revealed that Abby has another brother, Kyle (played by Daniel Louis Rivas), who is her biological brother, as it is revealed that Abby is in fact adopted.[23]

She appears well-versed in her field of study;[5] she is rarely stumped by the puzzles that Gibbs' team presents to her. Abby has been shown to have skills in traditional forensics, computer forensics, and hacking. She has implied that she has a PhD in chemistry.[24] It has been shown that she does all the work on the evidence herself. In season three, when she was given an assistant, Charles "Chip" Sterling, she revolted, but eventually learned to put up with him. However, their working partnership did not last long, as Abby later discovered Sterling had framed DiNozzo for murder. Exposed, Chip threatened her with a knife; she promptly subdued him, hog-tied him with duct tape, and insisted on being allowed to work alone from then on, something to which then-Director Jenny Shepard agreed.

It has also been mentioned numerous times that she is a devout Roman Catholic and is on a bowling team with several nuns.

In the 2009 NCIS: Los Angeles episode "Random On Purpose", Abby is described as being in her late 20s, suggesting she was born in the early 1980s. (Actress Perrette was born in 1969, and was 40 when this episode first aired.) However, in a flashback in the 2013 NCIS episode "Hit and Run", Abby is shown to be 10 years old in the early 1980s, implying that she was born in the early 1970s.

The character of Abby gets along well with all the rest of the team.[5] She is very fond of Ducky, who uses her full name, Abigail. She is called Abby or Abs by almost everyone else, except Director Leon Vance, who calls her Ms. Sciuto. Abby is fiercely loyal to the team, and considers them family, which is shown by her distress when one or more of them is in serious danger. Likewise, the team are generally fond of her and describe her as "the favorite".

Before her death in the line of duty, Special Agent Caitlin "Kate" Todd was a close friend of Abby's. They often hung out after work, and Abby is one of the few characters on the show to know what Kate's tattoo actually is.

She is friendly with Medical Assistant Jimmy Palmer. She has helped him with an autopsy and Rolfed him when he injured himself in the morgue in "Life Before His Eyes". In "Newborn King", Palmer brings his future father-in-law, Ed Slater, to NCIS. Later in the episode, McGee visits Abby to see she has locked the two in the back room. Jimmy states if Slater had not made a comment about Abby's tattoo, then they would not be in time out, implying he took Abby's side. Jimmy also chose Abby to be his "best woman" at his wedding in "The Missionary Position".[25]

In the episode "Crescent City", she is shown to have a relationship with Senior Special Agent Dwayne Cassius Pride, who runs the New Orleans NCIS office.

In the NCIS: Los Angeles episode "Random on Purpose", Abby, having been previously seen on video conference or talking to someone from her lab in Washington, DC, arrived in Los Angeles to meet the Office of Special Projects (OSP) team as she informed them she was investigating a serial killer called the Phantom who had murdered 15 people all over the country and had also left no DNA or even physical evidence at the scenes.

Having already formed a strong friendship with Eric Beale, Abby developed friendships with the OSP team, including G. Callen (Chris O'Donnell), Sam Hanna (LL Cool J), and most notably the operations manager Hetty Lange (Linda Hunt), who commented that Abby is "the first NCIS employee [she] has ever met with a sense of style".[29] Kensi Blye, another NCIS Special Agent, who is an expert in forensics, praised Abby for her high levels of thinking, stating that she lived up to the hype.

Abby was later kidnapped by the Phantom, later revealed to be a law firm receptionist named Tom Smith, who sought to kill her to keep his identity a secret, as he hoped to go around killing more people, having developed something of a taste for it. Although Vance mentioned that Gibbs and the NCIS Major Case Response Team were en route to Los Angeles to rescue her, Abby was saved due to the efforts of the OSP team and was later seen telling Gibbs and McGee on a video-conferencing link that she was okay.

To date, Abby has not returned to Los Angeles nor has she reappeared in any video-conference calls which strongly suggests that her appearances in season one were just one-offs.

During the first season of NCIS, Ross Warneke from The Age wrote of the character, "Her role is pivotal in the show because, as with so many crime series these days, the forensics laboratory is the scene of much of the action. Perrette's only shortcoming is her diction. Am I the only one who has difficulty understanding her?"[30] In January 2005, Bill Keveney from USA Today compared the characters on NCIS to those on Magnum, P.I. and commented, "the tattooed Abby, the presumed slacker who is anything but, is Bellisario's not-what-she-appears-to-be tribute to Magnum, a functioning, well-balanced Vietnam vet who contrasted many depictions of the era."[10] The New York Times writer Bill Carter described Abby as "television's only regular goth personality" in October of the same year.[31]

Later in the show's run, reception continued to be mostly positive, with some critics regarding her as "easily the most outgoing and affectionate member of the group".[32] In 2009, David Martingale of Star-Telegram wrote, "Abby Sciuto, a forensics scientist who, with her caffeine-fueled high energy and kooky Goth/cheerleader wardrobe, is one of a kind".[33] June Thomas from Slate Magazine noted in November 2011 that, "Abby may look like a freak, but she's a church-going patriot."[34] She has been described as "spacy"[35] and "a witty, lovable personality with forensic skills that are even greater than her charm."[5]

C. Coville from Cracked criticized the choice to describe Abby's age as "late twenties" in her 2009 guest appearance on NCIS: Los Angeles, finding it unbelievable for someone who "has still somehow picked up a PhD in chemistry, bachelor's degrees in sociology, criminology, and psychology, and good knowledge of hacking and computer forensic science".[36]

In March 2011, AOL named Abby as number 95 on a list of the 100 Most Memorable Female TV Characters.[37] In April 2013, a study by E-Poll Market Research listed Pauley Perrette and Cote de Pablo, who portrays Ziva David, among the top 10 most appealing celebrities in America.[38] Perrette and de Pablo were ranked as numbers 5 and 3 respectively.[39]

• Bergman, Kirsten. "Girls Just Wanna Be Smart? The Depiction of Women Scientists in Contemporary Crime Fiction". International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology. Lund University, Sweden: Center for Languages and Literature. 4 (3): 319–321.

• Pauley Perrette's profile on the official NCIS site
• Abby's Caf-Pow for sale on the CBS Store