I love NCIS as a show, but when they lost Ziva, the spark went from Dinozzo, and they've played that for the last few seasons. Originally the undertone of the show was that Gibbs was grooming Dinozzo to replace him, just as Mike Franks had done to him. But not so much anymore, Dinozzo is mostly lost, he doesn't need Gibbs to guide him, he could easily run his own team if he so wanted. And with events this year throwing Jeanne back into things, I feel that it has shown Tony those things he has let slip away.
Plus all the 'real' stuff as mentioned previously