Feature: Primetime

The Nine

It’s a question of survival for 'The Nine' hostages held in a bank raid siege. But the aftermath could be even worse…

A character-driven drama, The Nine follows a group of strangers who bond into an unlikely family after enduring a Los Angeles bank robbery together. What’s interesting about the series’ premise is the viewers are not shown the robbery in the first episode, just the lead up to it and the aftermath where they discover the incident lasted 52 hours and a SWAT team had to be called in to storm the bank and save the hostages. On a weekly basis what really happened during those 52 hours will be exposed in revealing flashbacks, showing that nothing may be what it seems.

“We’re going to unravel what happened in the bank over the course of the first season,” says creator and executive producer Hank Steinberg. “We know the lion’s share of what’s happened, and as we move forward things will evolve. The cast knows some of the [story twists]. Stay tuned for the season finale, and you’ll have a lot of your questions answered.”

Tim Daly, who portrays Nick Cavanaugh, a police detective who is caught in the bank and is the center of the standoff, immediately recognized that this story, “was almost a 9/11 parable. This horrible thing happens, and suddenly your view of the world and the way you look at your kids, and the way you look at time and your life is different. Everyone has moments of tragedy in their lives, and I think it’s interesting how this diverse group of people responds.”

“I do think that 9/11, as horrific as it was, has continued [to make] people feel less safe and more vulnerable,” agrees Kim Raver, who plays Kathryn Hale, a career-driven Assistant DA who becomes a hostage in the robbery. “It’s a very fine thread that we sometimes walk on.”

Of the show’s guarded storyline, John Billingsley who plays Egan Foote, a suicidal bank customer, acknowledges, “As is the case on all the serialized dramas, they’re holding their cards close to their vest, so there’s a lot we don’t know. We don’t know all the particulars about what happened in the bank robbery. I don’t know whether or not there’s a wild surprise, whether one of us was in on it.”

by Judy Sloane

Read the full feature in
TV Zone #207

Photo © ABC
Feature © Visual Imagination 2006. Not for reproduction

Taken from

TV Zone #207
November 2006
ships from Sep 13 2006
News-stand Price
UK £3.99 / US $7.99

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