After having spent the first 15 years of his career almost entirely as a film actor, outside of pilots that didn’t move forward, Scott Caan flipped the TV script on that status quo first with a recurring role on Entourage and then with a decade-long starring role on CBS’ influential (if problematic for its own reasons) drama reboot Hawaii Five-0. After ten years of portraying Danno Williams in the Aloha State, Caan took a step back from the small screen to write, produce, and star in the upcoming crime drama One Day as a Lion, and it was announced last September that he would return to CBS for the drama Topangaland. That project’s fate is currently unclear, but Caan has now signed on for another big broadcast series that appears destined for a quicker debut.
Scott Caan is set to take on a leading role for the new drama Alert, according to Variety, and fans don’t need to worry about this project falling through at any point, as Fox already confirmed its straight-to-series order in May 2022. For the new drama, Caan will be joining the previously cast Dania Ramirez, another Entourage vet whose recent years have been spent working on more fantastical TV series such as Once Upon a Time and Netflix’s soon-to-return hit Sweet Tooth.
Alert will be set in Philadelphia (rather than its previous setting of Los Angeles), and will center on the officers comprising a missing persons unit. Scott Caan will be portraying a character named Devon who, surprisingly enough, isn’t inherently a higher-up within the MPU. A smart and exceptionally brave guy, Devon was in his element while in the unpredictable turmoil of war in Iraq, but after his eleven-year-old son disappears, his world is ripped out from beneath him.
Six years after the boy first vanished, Devon’s existence has only darkened as he lives on in the ruins of his crumbled marriage. Then one day, he’s called up by his ex Nikki (Dania Ramirez), who is the lead supervisor of a missing persons unit, in the efforts to get him to help track down the young victim of a kidnapping. While there will no doubt be procedural elements involved, it already seems clear this show is destined to connect the cases together. And given this isn’t a premium cable network, the chances are far higher that the son will be found alive before all is said and done.
Alert is the creation of longtime writer and producer on The Blacklist, John Eisendrath, who will also taking on executive producer and showrunner duties for the Scott Caan drama. Given Caan’s recent push to put more creative efforts into the writing stages, it’s certainly possible he could also hop into the writers room on this project down the road.
Since it's still in the casting stages, that likely means Alert has a production window in mind in the nearish future, though we probably won’t see Scott Caan in the role until late-Spring or Summer 2023. Until then, anyone with a Paramount+ subscription can check out all ten seasons of Hawaii Five-0, and head to our 2022 TV premiere schedule to see all the new and returning shows popping up before the year’s end.
