Mysterious 'Nine' will try to hook island fans

0 Comments | Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Oct 4, 2006 | by ANDREW WINEKE THE GAZETTE

I'm trying to picture the pitch meeting:

"OK, it's like 'Lost,' only set in a bank."

That sort of, kind of seems to be the premise behind ABC's promising but peculiar new drama "The Nine," which premieres at 9:01 p.m. today.

The setup is simple enough, at first glance. Nine people are held hostage for two days in a botched bank robbery. After the trauma is over, they find they've formed lasting bonds.

The trick is that "The Nine" shows us only the beginning and the end of the robbery. What happened during all the hours between is a mystery, but those events clearly changed the people inside. A schlub (John Billingsley) becomes a hero, a doctor (Scott Wolf) finds his girlfriend (Jessica Collins) pulling away from him, a messed-up cop (Tim Daly) gets new purpose in his life. And so on.

Something big clearly happened in the bank, and, in the pilot, we get drips and drops and one big, fat clue.

Whether the mystery will prove to be as magnetic as "Lost's" ever- evolving mythology is dubious, but some terrific performances from Daly, Chi McBride as the bank manager and Kim Raver as a district attorney are good enough that audiences should perk up and pay attention.

It's a tense hour, though, which may be a little much back-to- back with the nail-biting plots of "Lost."

And it raises the question of this season -- how many serials will audiences put up with? The strength of "CSI" has been that its episodes are usually selfcontained. No soap operas, no story arcs, no commitment. And because there has been no commitment, audiences have showed up week after week.

Now, ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" has a scalpel to the throat of "CSI," and the latter is adding ongoing threads to its storylines to hook audiences in.

But with hits such as "Lost," "Desperate Housewives," and, let's not forget, "24," all demanding viewers watch every minute or be left in the dust, it makes it tough for the huge new crop of serials to find room.

NBC's "Heroes" seems to have found an audience on Monday nights, but the network's "Kidnapped" is falling on its face. And ABC's "Six Degrees," CBS' "Smith" and the CW's "Runaway" are all flailing, while CBS' "Shark," with its selfcontained episodes, is doing quite nicely.

What "The Nine" has that those others don't, of course, is a lead- in from the biggest serial of them all.

So will audiences stick around for two hours of don't-miss-a- second drama?

Tune in, and in, and in to find out.

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0275 or awineke@gazette.com

PREMIERE

"The Nine" airs at 9:01 p.m. today on ABC.