David McCallum wears an Ulysse Nardin Marine Chronometer 1846

For twenty seasons of NCIS, David McCallum worked over the steel table of the autopsy suite as Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard, the chief medical examiner, talking to the dead in a bow tie and a lab coat. CBS premiered the show in September 2003, and McCallum stayed with it until his death in September 2023, at 90.

The watch reported to sit under his cuff is an Ulysse Nardin Marine Chronometer 1846, the steel model named for the year Ulysse Nardin opened his workshop in Le Locle. That founding date is printed on the dial. The watch is a certified chronometer, and its small seconds hand sits at six o'clock. No episode lingers on it. The identification comes from viewers who catalog the watches in the show and from a watch-spotting site that cites an unnamed source on the production, a site that admits it never found a clean screen grab, only a glimpse of the Ulysse Nardin signature on the bracelet. That keeps the Ulysse Nardin a plausible call, not a confirmed sighting.

Ulysse Nardin built its reputation on marine chronometers, the precision clocks navies used to keep accurate time at sea and fix a ship's longitude, and it sold them to navies around the world. Ducky's job is medical examiner for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. If the spotters have the watch right, a Navy man wears on his wrist the descendant of a Navy instrument.