The season premiere of “Lost” on Wednesday comes with an additional enticement this season: Stick around at 9.
With any luck, a year from now we’ll be scrutinizing the characters of “The Nine” the way we do the denizens of that mysterious island, studying their connections and back stories, predicting their romantic possibilities and begging the producers for hints.
The pilot for “The Nine,” the ABC drama that follows “Lost” beginning Wednesday (at 9 p.m. on KMGH-Channel 7), is another profound TV experience, a fan puzzler with a rich mythology that keeps getting richer.
Of course, this is television, so the show could be deep- sixed by midseason. But this best serial drama of the 2006- 07 season should be recognized as a gem: great premise, terrific cast, beautiful execution. If there’s any justice – and who can say on a night ruled by “Dancing With the Stars” – the ratings gods will shine on “The Nine.”
The story, about a group of hostages who survived a bank robbery gone bad, is really about life after a shared trauma. The carefully constructed hour plays with time via flashbacks and explores the medical, legal, law enforecement and personal worlds colliding via these uniformly intriguing characters. We can’t help imagining what happened during the intense 52 hours that changed them forever.
What happens to a nation of strangers who endure a life- changing incident together? Any semblance to emotions experienced in the aftermath of 9/11 is strictly intentional, yet underplayed.
Brother-sister writing team K.J. and Hank Steinberg (his credits include “Without a Trace,” she wrote for “Judging Amy”) have created potentially the season’s most rewarding serial. They’ve cleverly withheld details of what happened – to be divulged slowly in chronological flashbacks – while keeping the foreground action in the present tense.
It’s a neat trick, cinematically and in terms of plot development, requiring careful storytelling, not showy TV acrobatics.
Among the folks who happen to walk into the bank on that ill-fated day are Nick Cavanaugh (Tim Daly), a police detective who has a difficult history with his boss; Nick is flirting with shy Eva Rios (Lourdes Benedicto), a single mom and bank teller, who is warming to him. Franny (Camille Guaty), Eva’s outgoing younger sister, is the bank teller who got Eva her bank job; Egan Foote (John Billingsley) is a rumpled older shlub who picked this day to commit suicide in the bank lavatory, but who evidently performs heroically in the crisis; Kathryn Hale (“24’s” Kim Raver) is a career-minded assistant D.A.; good-looking Jeremy Kates (“Party of Five’s” Scott Wolf) is a hotshot surgeon; Lizzie Miller (Jessica Collins), a hospital social worker, is Jeremy’s girlfriend.
Malcolm Jones (Chi McBride) is the bank’s branch manager whose daughter Felicia (Dana Davis), has come to visit that day. She is completely numbed by what happened and cannot speak about it.
The superb pilot is worthy of repeat viewings. It introduces the cast after, before and during the incident, and ultimately brings them together at a diner to reconnect. In their struggle to make sense of irrational events, they hope to gain clues from each other’s vantage point. In their pursuit of meaning, we find the our own terror-touched lives reflected.
Where “Lost” keeps viewers off balance by layering in questions of shifting reality and paranormal activity, “The Nine” will keep us on edge by delving into a very specific reality, an unspeakable horror with lasting effects.
What in the world happened in there? Something turned the supposed valiant into whimpering victims, made self-loathing losers into unexpected heroes, altered love relationships, demolished trust and caused a young girl to shut down. What drove the robbers to commit the crime and then become killers? How would we react in similar circumstances?
There is no talk of airplanes, skyscrapers or box cutters. The criminals are of the domestic variety. The proximity to a specific national trauma remains unstated – the writers avoid allusions to 9/11 – but the parallel feeling of mundane moments erupting to change the world is unmistakable.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
