He’s the consummate New Yorker … via Los Angeles

As the latest “NCIS” spin-off begins, Sam Hanna is finally coming home. So is LL Cool J, who plays him.
Hanna has done 342 episodes in Los Angeles and Hawaii. Now — starting at 9 p.m. Tuesday (Oct. 6) on CBS — “NCIS: New York” (shown here) begins.
It will visit “every kind of nook and cranny of New York, in the five boroughs,” said showrunner Byron Balasco.
That makes this different from other shows, LL Cool J promised. “It’s definitely more gritty …. It gives you so many different people from all over the world, so many different types of energies.”
And it pairs him with a guy who feels like the consummate New Yorker.
Nick Schaeffer, Sam’s new “NCIS” partner, is short (5-foot-5), taut and high-energy. He’s small in size, large in actions and words. You’d want him to be your East Coast guide … and he’s played by Scott Caan, who’s from Los Angeles.
“I spent a lot of time in New York growing up,” Caan said. “I was raised by East Coast people.”
His parents — film star James Caan and actress-model Sheila Marie Ryan — split after a year of marriage, but he said his dad was a perpetual influence.
“My old man was so animated and so interesting to watch,” Caan said. He was “like an actor’s role model. I just think that energy and that type of guy … has always been interesting to me.”
James Caan was born in the Bronx and grew up in Queens, the son of Jewish immigrants. Scott often visited his roots there. It “felt like home to me — the culture of New York City, the attitude, just that vibe.”
It’s also the home turf of LL Cool J, who grew up in Long Island when he was James Todd Smith. (Nowadays, his colleagues call him Todd.)
There’s one common point between Cool J, 58, and Caan, 50: Both started in music, not in acting.
Cool J was 16 when his first single helped propel the new Def Jam label, 19 when his second album was No. 6 on the Billboard charts. He’s had eight more top-10 albums, some of them after he was already a TV star.
Caan’s music career was less successful He was a roadie and then a rapper called Mad Skillz; then came acting.
On TV, he’s had regular roles in shows set in Los Angeles (“Entourage”), Hawaii (“Hawaii Five-0”) and Philadelphia (“Alert: Missing Persons Unit”). Now it’s New York, with a new colleague.
After all the “NCIS: Los Angeles” years, Cool J said, the character began globetrotting. He was “this kind of special-ops guy who would (work) for different people around the world.”
We get a brief, high-octane sampling of that at the start of the new series. Then Hanna settles into his old home town, where a fast-talking New Yorker is ready to be his new partner.