It has only been about three years since the Hawaii Five-0 cast had their final curtain call, but Scott Caan is already back in the crime procedural game. This time, his jurisdiction is in Philadelphia — far away from the sunny island getaway — and his specialty is investigating disappearances and abductions on Fox’s new police drama, Alert: Missing Persons Unit.
Co-created by The Blacklist executive producer John Eisendrath and Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx, the series — which premieres tonight after NFL on Fox before moving to its regular Monday night time slot at 9 p.m. EST — will focus on a different case each episode, but is also bound by a through-line plot involving a personal connection between Caan’s character and that of his co-star, Dania Ramirez. We shall start with them in our following breakdown of who plays whom in the Alert: Missing Persons Unit cast and where you may have seen them before.
Scott Caan (Jason Grant)
As Jason Grant — a police officer still haunted by the disappearance of his son, Keith, years earlier — we have Scott Caan, who began following in the footsteps of his late father, James Caan, as the title character of the 1995 crime drama, A Boy Called Hate, which was also the first of three times he starred alongside his dad. He managed to make a name for himself on his own with films like the Will Smith-led Enemy of the State in 1998, 1999’s coming-of-age sports movie classic Varsity Blues, financial crime drama Boiler Room in 2000, and Gone in 60 Seconds with Nicolas Cage the same year.
The following year, he played another crook, but to greater success, as part of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven cast as Turk Malloy — a role he reprised in two sequels before joining HBO’s Entourage cast and, before that ended, he had already become the new Danno for CBS’ Hawaii Five-0 reboot. During that series’ run, Caan played himself in the 2013 meta comedy 3 Geezers!, appeared in Barry Levinson’s Rock the Kasbah in 2015, and will return to the big screen with the crime drama One Day as a Lion, which is now in post-production.
Dania Ramirez (Nikki Batista)
Playing Nikki Batista — head of Philadelphia’s Missing Persons Unit and Grant’s ex-wife — is Scott Caan’s Entourage co-star (for Season 7) Dania Ramirez, who debuted in 1998 as Jay-Z’s girlfriend in the feature-length music video, Streets Is Watching, before making her major motion picture debut in Spike Lee’s 25th Hour. In 2004, she reunited with Lee for She Hate Me and appeared in the live-action adaptation of the classic cartoon, Fat Albert, before starring in 2008’s found footage thriller Quarantine, 2012’s Premium Rush and American Reunion, and appearing in Jumanji: The Next Level in 2019.
She also has played a few comic book characters — namely Callisto in X-Men: The Last Stand, Red Velvet on Justice League Action, and Scandal Savage in Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay — but her recurring roles on shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Sopranos and starring roles on Heroes, Devious Maids, and Netflix’s Sweet Tooth cast are her biggest claims to fame. Ramirez also co-writes and narrates the historical podcast drama, Sisters of the Underground.
Adeola Role (Kemi)
By joining the Alert: Missing Persons Unit cast as Kemi — a shaman who takes a more holistic approach to solving cases — Adeola Role is reuniting with co-creator John Eisendrath following her guest spot on The Blacklist in Season 7. That was only her first taste of acting in a crime procedural, as she would later appear alongside the Blue Bloods cast in two episodes as Leticia Harris — a lawyer whose mother is found to be a murderer in Season 12.
She debuted in the 2009 film Interface a decade before she appeared on the second season of the FX drama Pose as a nurse named Erica. In 2021, Role made another great guest appearance on the TBS original comedy The Last O.G. in its fourth season and, in 2022, guest-starred in two episodes of Paramount+'s hit spin-off of The Good Wife, The Good Fight.
Ryan Broussard (Mike)
As Mike — who has become Nikki’s love interest since he was assigned to search for Keith years earlier — we have Ryan Broussard, who is another Alert: Missing Persons Unit cast member with previous experience starring on crime TV shows. His first gig after his debut on The CW’s sci-fi romance, Star-Crossed, was an episode of NCIS: New Orleans, followed by two episodes of MTV’s series spin-off of Scream, guest spots on Blue Bloods and the Apple TV+ miniseries Black Bird, and a recurring role alongside the Only Murders in the Building cast for the first season.
He also had a small role in 2015’s The Big Short, played a prison guard in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, went uncredited as an aide to the President in the 2017 disaster movie extravaganza, Geostorm, and was in a Lifetime original holiday romance movie that also happened to star several One Tree Hill veterans called A Christmas Wish. Broussard’s other notable TV credits include Amazon’s romantic anthology series, Modern Love, and Tyler Perry’s BET original drama, Sistas.
Graham Verchere (Keith)
Starring as Jason Grant and Nikki Batista’s long-lost son, Keith, is Graham Verchere, who — at just barely over 20 years old as of now — has almost as much experience with crime movies and TV shows as most of the Alert: Missing Persons Unit cast, if not more. After debuting on an episode of Psych, he appeared in two mystery movies for the Hallmark Channel, landed a recurring role on Fargo Season 3, led the coming-of-age suspense thriller Summer of ’84, and appeared on the 2022 true crime miniseries, Under the Banner of Heaven, on FX.
He also has experience with fantasy (such as an episode of Once Upon a Time), horror (namely the anthology horror TV shows 50 States of Fright and Two Sentence Horror Stories), and comic book adaptations (with his recurring role on Supergirl as George Lockwood). Verchere was also in a live-action Woody Woodpecker movie from 2017, starred in Disney+’s adaptation of the novel Stargirl, and has played Freddie Highmore’s younger self on The Good Doctor.
Perhaps merely hearing about the talented names in the Alert: Missing Persons Unit cast should be enough to alert you that this new crime procedural is worth seeing.
