After watching the bizarre and slightly corny trailer for ABC’s upcoming conspiracy thriller Zero Hour, I must admit it made it sort of hard for me to recommend this midseason drama. The only elements pushing me to give it a try was that Prison Break creator Paul Scheuring is behind it and that revered actor Anthony Edwards (ER) stars. Today’s TCA panel pimping Zero Hour led by Scheuring and with some comments from Edwards has injected some much-needed confidence into me–it’s very high concept, it’s serialized to the core, and this show might just be an addicting thrill ride that educates and poses some lofty, intriguing questions about religion and history.
Briefly, Zero Hour stars Edwards as Hank Galliston, a publisher of a skeptics magazine, who has spent his career following clues, debunking myths and cracking conspiracies. But when his wife, Laila (Jacinda Barrett), is abducted from her antique clock shop by an international terrorist, Hank gets pulled into one of the most compelling mysteries in human history, stretching around the world and back centuries.
“The entire show is about the man or the woman beneath the identity,” Scheuring explained. “If you wear a Christian cross, are you automatically good? If you wear a Nazi armband, are you automatically bad? And that I think ultimately makes for more complex and interesting drama. All those different characters wear these different surface adornments, like Naziism, Christianity. But what’s the human beneath it?… I want to have a more sophisticated three-dimensional view of the characters as opposed to ‘Nazi! Bad!’ I mean, who cares?” After posing a hypothetical question ‘is the Christian God is real’ he stated, “Scientifically, that’s the question we are starting to ask as the season goes along.” (Along the same lines of he was stated earlier, he made a rather controversial statement when he said “The idea that all Nazis are bad is something we are exploring, 100 percent.”)
Scheuring shared, “There were two mandates: deliver something gigantic and make a spectacle.” Later he went on to admit, “There’s a fair amount of crazy in here.” Though critics are making comparions to the movies that star Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon, Scheuring was adamant, “We’re not the Da Vinci Code.”
The first season of Zero Hour can be defined as a narrative with a beginning, middle, and satisfying conclusion that closes a chapter on the overall story. “One of the things I learned from Prison Break and Lost is that with a serialized show, sooner or later you start flapping your wings because a story needs to end,” said Scheuring. “I applied that wisdom to the construct of this show; it’s like 24, where you reset every year.” Each season plans to follow a new investigation in the conspiracy led by Edwards’ Hank Galliston. He said that he looked at the last three frames of the 13-episode season and reverse-engineered the story from there, so you can rest assured that at least the first crop of episodes will tell a tight tale that leads towards a finale that will wrap up major elements introduced over the course of the season.
Executive producer Zack Estrin (The River) chimed in and explained that the show provides a platform for viewers to further explore and learn about the mysteries that unravel in the show. “It might give the show a life in between episodes,” he said. Though it’s not necessary, he envisions people surfing the Internet and getting lost in Wikipedia to enhance their viewing experience.
Later in the panel Edwards admitted that it was his plan to retire from TV after his eight year stint as Dr. Mark Greene on ABC’s ER. “I said I was done,” he said. “When ER was done, I felt like I’d really accomplished something. It was an amazing eight years, and it took awhile to recover from that. If I was going to come back having done that, it would have to be as exciting as that was going in there. Like all things in life, this was a surprise when [Zero Hour executive producer] Lorenzo di Bonaventura, an old friend, brought me the script. I said, ‘If these guys are crazy enough to tell this story, I want to do it with them.'”
Zero Hour premieres Thursday, February 14 at 8PM.