The Nine

I watched this premiere tonight after reading a great review in the paper. I had recently seen Inside Man, a movie about a bank robbery, and this show reminded me of it.

The summary is 9 people are taken hostage in a bank robbery, and they are released 52 hours later. The show will fill in the details of what happened during that time through flashbacks, and of course continue various threads in the aftermath. For example, one woman is pregnant but her boyfriend doesn't know it, and they are in the process of breaking up.

Several actors are familiar: Kim Raver, who was Audrey Raines on a previous season of 24, plays an attorney with some political ambitions. John Billinglsey, who was Dr. Phlox on Enterprise, is a mild mannered insurance salesman who went to the bank to commit suicide, until the bank robbery intervened. Timothy Daly's character Nick Cavanaugh seems to be the focus - he is an ex-cop dismissed under unexplained circumstances, with a history of feuding with his chain of command. Something happened during the hostage negotiations that makes him furious (he punches out an FBI negotiator when they are released)... something that the FBI would like to cover up, since they offer him reinstatement, a promotion, medals and commendations, if he just says everybody did a great job and the death of another hostage was the fault of the bank robbers.

The bank branch manager (Malcolm Jones played by Chi McBride) is taken hostage along with his daughter Felicia (Dana Davis). The cliffhanger in this episode is while the ex-hostages get together for dinner to celebrate, she goes to visit on of the bank robbers in prison... and they clearly know each other. The implication is she may have been the source of inside information for planning the robbery...

I'll see how well this show does revealing the backstory, and continuing plotlines related to info we haven't had fully explained. So far it was pretty good.