Slater searches for a hit with “The Forgotten”

By Stacey Harrison

Photo: © 2009 American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. Credit: Adam Taylor
Photo: © 2009 American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. Credit: Adam Taylor

Actors are used to rejection. Even the most optimistic souls are probably looking at years of being passed over at auditions until they finally get their big break. After more than 25 years in show business, Christian Slater knows this well.

So when his first big splash into TV (NBC’s My Own Worst Enemy) was billed as one of last fall’s surefire hits, only to fizzle after a few episodes, he didn’t let it deter him from taking another crack at it.

“I absolutely loved doing that show,” he says. “I had a great time. I developed a real family atmosphere with everybody from the cast to the crew from day one, so that is one of the more difficult aspects. When something doesn’t go the way you would love it to go, it’s disappointing, obviously. But that’s life. It helps you to grow, and prepares you for the next door that you have to walk through, which happens to be this one.”

The Forgotten (ABC, Sept. 22) casts him as Alex Donovan, an ex-cop who left the force after his young daughter was kidnapped to dedicate his life to identifying John and Jane Doe murder victims. Joining him is a group of volunteers — all amateurs with their own reasons for taking up the cause — who call themselves The Forgotten Network. Each week they pick up the trail of an unidentified murder victim whose police investigation has run dry.

While there is a fair amount of police work involved, Slater believes the show offers a different take on the procedural genre popularized by the CSI and Law & Order franchises.

“I’m a huge fan of those types of shows. … You can’t help but get wrapped up into them,” he says. “[But] one of the elements I felt had been missing from some of those shows is the heart, human element. I feel like that’s what The Forgotten certainly has for me. I did get emotionally involved as I was reading it and as I was watching it.”

What he watched was the original pilot for The Forgotten that starred Rupert Penry-Jones in the Alex Donovan role and 24’s Reiko Aylesworth in another lead. Such recasting often means trouble for a show, but Slater is very matter-of-fact about the whole thing, chalking it up to standard business procedure in Hollywood, while writer/executive producer Mark Friedman actually looked at it as a positive.

“It’s a great opportunity as a writer,” Friedman says. “You rarely get a second chance to do your first episode again, so it’s actually been really great because we’ve had a chance to address some things in the pilot that we weren’t as sure about, and things we can make stronger and just make the show overall more entertaining and more sort of what we all wanted it to be originally.”

Most of the changes involve how Alex relates to the group, Friedman says, making him more intense, and more of a leader. He is the only member of the network with an official police background — the others all have day jobs, including a telephone repairman and a high-school science teacher — so he is also able to clue them in to certain legal procedures and detective methods.

Michelle Borth (Tell Me You Love Me), Bob Stephenson, Anthony Carrigan and Rochelle Aytes, all holdovers from the original pilot, round out the cast of the Jerry Bruckheimer production.

In another twist to the genre, it is the murder victims who narrate the story from beyond the grave. It’s a technique that Friedman says lets the show focus not so much on the mystery of who killed the person, but how they got to such a place in their lives that this would happen to them.

For Slater, it was an immediate hook. “You … begin to identify with this person that’s no longer with us on this planet,” he says. “That’s what these people do at the end of the day. They give these people who can’t speak for themselves any longer a voice, and that’s what this show is attempting to do.”

Not just the victims, but the groups of real-life amateur sleuths who serve as the inspiration for The Forgotten, a phenomenon Slater says he was unaware of before production began. If the show can highlight their efforts, or even inspire more of them, then “that would be worth it.”

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