Hostages
Mondays at 10 PM Eastern/9 PM Central,
Premiering September 23
With its similarly intense mix of political intrigue and
personal drama, Hostages is obviously
harboring hopes of becoming the next Homeland. After all, the two series have more in common
than merely the cleverness of their blonde heroines; both action thrillers have
origins in Israel, which is fast becoming fertile ground for growing America’s
future TV hits.
Showtime’s series, adapted from the Israeli Hatufim, captured critical raves and
swept the Emmy Awards in 2012. Now, CBS’
high-concept Hostages, based on a
previously unproduced script out of Tel Aviv, has nabbed both a top-notch cast
and one of TV’s highest-profile launching pads for a drama, the network’s
Mondays at 10.
Hostages stars
Toni Collette in the juicy lead role of Ellen Sanders, a Washington,
DC surgeon whose family is taken captive by team of rogue FBI agents on the eve
of her operation on the President of the United States. Commanded to kill her political patient,
Sanders is tested in her resolve as a medical professional, as a wife and
mother, and as a patriotic citizen. The
scope of the story, says producer Alon Aranya, who teamed with writer Jeffrey
Nachmanoff to tailor the original script for an American audience, reaches
beyond that of the typical television procedural. The intricately-plotted, surprise-rigged Hostages “will be like a feature film
designed for TV.”
In another way that Hostages
will be notable for the network, the series will, following its September premiere,
run for 15 straight episodes with few repeats or interruptions, before ceding
its timeslot in early 2014 to another hotly anticipated drama. (Intelligence, which stars Lost’s Josh Holloway as a government
intelligence operative whose brain has been implanted with a supercomputer
microchip and CSI’s Marg Helgenberger
as his agency boss, is scheduled to debut February 24.) Such shorter seasons have long been the norm
on cable, but as network president Nina Tassler explains, this is a first for
CBS: “We’re normally in the 22-episode
business, because our fans don’t want less of their favorite shows – they want
more.” But Tassler and her team were
soon won over by the Hostages
producers’ detailed plans for a nailbiting first season, which she describes as
“fifteen really terrific episodes, jampacked with big events and plot twists.”
The twists were what lured actors like Collette, who
remembers that “when I read the pilot script, it was unlike any other
show. I loved that I didn’t know what
was happening -- although I thought I did.
It really was a page-turner, where I couldn’t put it down.” Collette is joined by Tate Donovan as Ellen’s
less successful – and less-than-faithful – husband Brian, Dylan McDermott as Duncan
Carlisle, the erstwhile Fed turned conspirator and kidnapper, and James
Naughton as the President targeted for assassination.
But both Hostages’ producer and leading lady warn not to blindly accept these simplified descriptions of the show’s characters. “The show is a conspiracy thriller – and as such, all is not what it seems. There’s always another layer,” Aranya teases.
“People keep asking Dylan, ‘How is it to play the bad guy?’”
Collette adds. “But he may not be entirely
bad. All of these characters have their
reasons for doing what they do. And
those reasons will slowly be revealed.”
