This Thursday, Zero Hour, a new globetrotting conspiracy/adventure series in the vein of National Treasure and The Da Vinci Code, debuts on ABC. The show stars ER's Anthony Edwards as Hank Galliston, the owner of an anti-paranormal magazine called Modern Skeptic, who gets sucked into the dangerous world of Rosicrucian doomsday clocks after his wife Laila (Jacinda Barrett) is violently kidnapped by an international mercenary.
I had the chance to speak to Edwards about the breakneck pace of his new show, the cinematic scope of the story and the likelihood that the mystery will be solved in Season 1.
IGN TV: There's a big twist at the end of the pilot episode. Can we expect that kind of reveal every week or are the shocks and questions spread out more?
Anthony Edwards: You can expect a big step forward every episode. We're not holding back. And the good news is that we will solve the mystery in 13 episodes. So at the end of the season, we're not going to go "Let's just drag this on for another two years." We're taking a big story and we're attacking it. And expect a lot of surprises along the way.
IGN: Not only does Hank lose his wife in the first episode, but his entire world-view comes crumbling down around him. Can you talk a bit about that?
Edwards: Definitely. The set up is that Hank is a guy who is not a believer. He's a rationalist and needs proof for everything. And he's spent his career debunking mysteries. So what happens when you take a guy like that and give him a really big mystery? It challenges everything for him. And yet his skill is that he's also a really good investigative reporter. So he doesn't give up. He keeps looking and keeps digging to find out what's really going on. And he's also got back up - a team - consisting of Addison Timlin (Rachel) and Scott Michael Foster (Arron) who play his young reporters. So everyone gets involved in a way. The engine of investigative reporting is what's driving us through here. The crisis is on a personal level.
IGN: How long can we expect Hank and his wife to be apart?
Edwards: Laila, Hank's wife, will come back into the fold eventually. So we're not going to have a reunited couple on episode 13. But that's as much as I'll tell you about that. The kidnapping is the kicker to get into the world. Take a guy and take away his wife and in pursuit of that we'll start un-peeling all the layers on this crazy-ass onion that Paul Scheuring created.
Edwards with Timlin, Foster and Carmen Ejogo in Zero Hour.
IGN: There's a non-stop travel element to this show. Can you talk about the scope? It seems very cinematic.
Edwards: It's actually part of the reason why I really wanted to do this show. I spent eight years in the submarine of a hospital set on ER, and so just visually this was appealing. Most shows shoot five days on a sound stage and maybe three days out. We're two days on a sound stage and six days out. So we did a lot of traveling this year, as a crew, to all the five boroughs of New York City, which is where we're based. But we made a lot of those places look like Paraguay and India and Germany and Istanbul. We were all over.
For the pilot, for the arctic scene, we went up to Montreal. So we actually did travel on that and shot it all on Lake Winnipeg. And we landed a plane on the ice, and being a new pilot, with only two years of flying, that was a huge thrill for me. It's a huge show. We're a big crew. We've got a lot of trucks. We're shooting in the nice, wide format. And Pierre [Morel, director of Taken], who directed the pilot is a film director, and Tony Wolberg who was our DP also works in film. So, nothing against television of course, but we really started with a filmic base of creators. Visually, for sure. Paul Scheuring [Prison Break], our writer, comes out of television. So the ambition was always to make it big.
IGN: How much has the model for TV shows changed since you left ER? Or are you even able to get a sense of that with this show?
Edwards: I think we're a perfect example of how it's changed. If you had pitched this show five, or ten, years ago, it would have been a very tough sell. Trying to tell someone you wanted to do a show without closed ended stories for season. The thinking back then was that you have to leave everything open and the goal was to reach 150 episodes, and you'd destroy that if you finished the story. So we're very much more in that cable world where every season has its own story to it. And you tell the entire thing in chunks. And Paul Lee [ABC Entertainment President] is excited for this idea and has been supportive of it from the very beginning.
Zero Hour premieres on February 14th at 8/7c on ABC.
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and on IGN at mattfowler. No other choice you will ever make will be as easy and render such a great reward.
Source : ign[dot]com
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