Jenny Shepard

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NCIS character
Jennifer "Jenny" Shepard
Rank	Director
Gender	Female
Hair color	Red
Actor	Lauren Holly
First appearance	Kill Ari part 1
Last appearance	Current Character

NCIS Director Jennifer "Jenny" Shepard is a fictional character on the TV show NCIS played by Lauren Holly. She replaced NCIS's former director, Thomas Morrow, at the start of the program's third season after Morrow took a Deputy Director's position with the Department of Homeland Security. Her appointment occurred in the wake of the assassination of NCIS agent Caitlin Todd by a rogue Mossad agent.

Previously, she had worked with Special Agent Jethro Gibbs in Paris, France on an undercover assignment. It appears that they had a personal relationship outside the scope of the mission. The fourth season episode "Smoked" reveals that Shepard also knew Donald "Ducky" Mallard in those days, Shepard once helping Mallard and Gibbs escape France by commandeering a boat to allow the men to flee across the English Channel.

When she is promoted to Director, Gibbs does not agree with this move because he believes that she is too good of a field agent to be working in an office (and in several subsequent episodes Shepard is shown using "director's prerogative" to become more involved in investigations). She and Gibbs frequently butt heads in investigations. In addition to Gibbs and Mallard, she has also previously worked with Officer Ziva David in Israel on counterterrorism operations, which is why she has brought Ziva with her to NCIS to work with Gibbs' team in order to investigate Todd's murder.

She once said that Gibbs views her as a wife. When a suspect said that that is good, she then stated that Gibbs has been divorced three times (in a later episode, she observed that Gibbs appeared to be partial to redheads, suggesting his wives all had red hair; Shepard is also a redhead). She is very caring of Gibbs, to the point that when he is in a coma at the end of the third season, she leaves a dinner with the President to come to the hospital to see him. In helping him to regain his memories of the previous 15 years, she reminds him that they were once lovers.

Jenny works with much of NCIS as a professional director. However, with Gibbs' team, she works much more personally, such as seeking advice from Ducky or confiding in Tony. She is also shown as being a confidant of Ziva David's. In the later stages of season 3 her relationship with Tony cooled off somewhat, with Tony insisting on using formal terms when speaking with her.

At the end of Season 3, Gibbs abruptly resigns from NCIS after recovering from his coma but being unable to prevent an attack on a navy vessel. Shepard, on Gibbs' recommendation, puts DiNozzo in charge of the NCIS team. Unknown to Gibbs, however -- and as revealed in the second episode of Season 4, Shepard decides not to file Gibbs' retirement package with the Navy, officially ending his career. Instead, she places Gibbs on vacation and back leave; ultimately, Gibbs agrees to return to NCIS although Shepard -- harking back to her earlier relationship with him -- states that part of her wants him to stay away for fear that he might not recover from the next coma.

Around this time her relationship with Tony also begins to warm up, with her recommending him for promotion to team leader of another NCIS unit in the third episode of the season, but expressing her pride in him when he turns it down. In this same episode she is shown receiving a bouquet of flowers from an as-yet unidentified admirer. It's worth noting that in this episode Tony refers to her by her first name for the first time.

Despite her allowing Gibbs to return to NCIS, at the start of the fourth season Shepard begins distancing Gibbs from an apparent anti-terrorism operation involving NCIS. On several occasions she has ordered viewscreens in the NCIS control room (MTAC) to "go dark" when Gibbs enters the room, to prevent him from viewing information that Shepard describes to him as "need to know, and you don't need to know". The reason for this secrecy and whether it has anything to do with Gibbs personally, has yet to be revealed. In the episode "Smoked" it is revealed that Tony has been part of some of these operations without Gibbs' knowledge, and that Tony has been acting in this capacity since Gibb's return, according to Ziva.

Her assistant's name is Cynthia Sumner, played by Stephanie Mello.