“I got a call one day from [Jamie Foxx’s] producing partner, Datari Turner, and he said that he wanted to pitch me an idea for a show,” Alert: Missing Persons Unit co-creator and executive producer John Eisendrath recalled about the first conversation he had about the new FOX crime show, premiering tonight at 8/7c. “The first thing he said was, ‘How about something about Amber Alert and the people who go missing?’ And I was like, ‘Wow, that's actually a great idea for a show.’ And he explained to me that Jamie had had an experience one afternoon where he thought his child had gone missing. And it was not the case, but for about six or seven hours, he wasn't sure what had happened. And once that had happened to him, he did some investigating about the people who find missing persons, and it fascinated him. That was basically what Datari told me, and I did agree, I thought it would be a great idea.”
(Steve Wilkie/FOX)
Alert: Missing Persons Unit centers on a formerly married couple whose marriage didn’t survive their own missing son’s unsolved case. “Dealing with the idea of having your son go missing and then having him come back and you're not sure if it's actually your son, playing with those ideas week to week, month to month, episode to episode, it's unprecedented,” Scott Caan said of his role as Jason Grant. “For me, this is, without question, the most complicated thing I've ever done… I'm learning more about myself. I'm learning a ton about acting. There's just so much going on, and I think that it is definitely more intense than anything I've ever done in a really beautiful good way. And I don't mean to sound too goofy or corny, but if you like being creative, if you like digging in as an actor, there isn't much out there that is more complicated problem-solving as an actor than this show has been for me, and I think I knew that right away. It's really challenging and I think that the second we aren't challenged anymore at what we do, we should just quit, you know? This isn't something that I can just show up and not give a lot of thought to. And that's what keeps me excited about it, and that's why people will be excited to watch the show, because we're literally trying to figure things out all the time. It's not like anything else out there, that I've seen anyway.”
“Acting is very therapeutic,” agreed Dania Ramirez, who plays Nikki Batista, Jason’s ex-wife and head of the Philadelphia Police Department’s Missing Persons Unit (MPU). “That's not something you can shut off right away.” Emotions run high on a show like Alert, and it’s not just something the actors feel. “Our crew and the people that we're working with every single day, the writers, the people that are here and our other cast mates, we become our own family outside of what we film every day, and I think we have that support system to really get through that and be able to say, ‘Okay, that was that. Let's put it to the side, and now our lives will continue, and we have to figure out a way to pick ourselves back up.’ But it's very difficult. And it's interesting because we were in Entourage together, and what a completely different vibe that was, because that's fun, and we were completely different people back then. We didn't have kids back then. We didn't really know each other. We didn't have any scenes together. So I could say maybe we played together. We, like, hung out. Who we were then and who we are now is a completely different ballgame, and being parents and dealing with a show that has to deal with missing children is something that's really close to the heart, and it's hard to leave behind.”
“We got really lucky,” FOX Entertainment president of scripted programming Michael Thorn said on casting both Scott and Dania. “You read these scripts, and you imagine that Jason and Nikki have this history, and you you just hope that your lead actors are going to have the kind of chemistry that Dania and Scott had. So we're so lucky to have them both, because individually they're terrific, but when you put them together in their character dynamics, they shine together.”
Rooted in the mystery of what happened to their son reuniting Jason and Nikki, audiences will be rooting for them to succeed. “A lot of TV is wish fulfillment,” John Eisendrath concluded. “When we meet them, Scott's character is with one woman, and Dania's character is getting engaged to another person, so it's the most complicated possible situation. But for them, I was hoping that they would be able to navigate that incredibly tumultuous space with love and friendship and humor, and they do an amazing job of making that feel real. And I think that is exactly what I'd hoped for. I think people will watch them as an ex-couple and as coworkers and as co-parents and feel like they're doing an amazing job navigating an incredibly difficult and dramatic set of circumstances.”
Alert: Missing Persons Unit premieres tonight at 8/7c on FOX.