Speaking with Scott Caan about his new FOX missing-persons drama Alert: Missing Persons Unit (premieres Sunday, Jan. 8, at 8pm ET/PT and airs Mondays at 9pm ET/PT beginning Jan. 9) the conversation briefly turned to his father, legendary actor James Caan, who passed away last year. He offered that his dad “was the kind of dude that if he did something, he wanted to be the best at it. So whether it be acting or jiujitsu or surfing or football or baseball, whatever it was, he was just someone who was good at everything. And that’s sort of what he taught me: If you’re going to play, play to be the best, or don’t play.”
That’s an ethos Caan has certainly put to use over his multitalented career that spans various art forms — in addition to being an actor and writer, he is also an accomplished photographer and was a rapper in the 1990s — as well as in other areas, including becoming a black belt in Brazilian jiujitsu.
Having acted in, and written, feature films (including the upcoming crime thriller One Day as a Lion, which costars Frank Grillo, J.K. Simmons and Virginia Madsen), Caan is likely still most familiar to audiences for his TV work, even if he himself admits that “15 years ago, if you told me I was on a television show, I would say, ‘There’s no way.’ Now I feel like television’s kind of the game.”
It’s a game the actor has been successful at, particularly with his Golden Globe-nominated role as “Danno” in the 2010-20 reimagining of Hawaii Five-0. Now, for his next regular series, he headlines Alert alongside Dania Ramirez.
Coming from executive producers Jamie Foxx and John Eisendrath (The Blacklist), Alert follows members of the Philadelphia Police Department’s Missing Persons Unit. Each episode features a life-or-death search for a missing person that runs alongside police officers Jason Grant (Caan) and his ex-wife Nikki Batista’s (Ramirez) series-long quest to find the truth about their own long-lost son.
After a decade on Five-0, it would have been understandable if Caan had not wanted to do a police drama right away, and he agrees that if this series had been just another procedural, “I probably would’ve held out and looked for something else. … To me, if you’re going to do a cop show or a procedural — whether you’ve done one for 10 years before or not — you’ve got to figure out a way to make it better than the other ones, or make it special.”
Upon reading Alert, Caan found that it did offer something special, and “a chance to do something I had never done before, although the lane is the same.”
Caan had plenty more insights on Alert.
Can you elaborate on what you found unique and exciting about Alert?
Scott Caan: From the second I read this, I saw that [Jason and Nikki] were flawed characters, and I saw that their personal life was so important to the show working. I think a lot of the times on procedural shows, or cop shows in general, that’s sort of left to the side. I had a conversation with [executive producer] John Eisendrath, and the things that were important to him are the same things that were important to me, and the things that I wanted to explore with these characters are the same things he wanted to explore. So just from reading this show, it had something special about it that was different than the others. … You say it’s a cop show, and immediately you think that they’re all the same thing. But as far as [filming] the pilot, and what John pitched me for the episodes to come, it was stuff that I’ve never experienced or played with before as an actor. That’s what got me excited about it.
Does the series primarily focus on solving current missing-persons cases, with flashbacks to Jason and Nikki’s son disappearing?
There’s not a ton of flashbacks. The opening scene takes place six years before the actual show starts; you’ll see us six years ago, [when] our son goes missing. Then, in the beginning of the first scene [in] the present day, we find our son … or who we think is our son. And really, the struggle for [our] characters is trying to figure out what really happened, and who is this boy? Is he our son? … So the drive of the personal part of the show is really us trying to figure out what happened with our son, because there are a lot of twists and turns. One minute, we think he’s our son; [another] minute, we think he’s not our son. And that takes us through the 10 episodes of this first season.
Not all real-life missing-persons cases end happily. Do stories on Alert ever veer into this darker territory, or are the cases generally solved in a satisfying manner?
I mean, I think you know the answer to that question. There’s a type of show where people want to see the happy ending. So when it comes to the procedural element of the show, we usually get a bad guy. But in our personal relationship — again, which is what makes the show different than the other procedural shows — our personal life does not get resolved. Sometimes I think there’s a reason that procedural shows aren’t heavily serialized, and it’s because I think that a lot of the people that watch [them] kind of want to just feel great at the end and not have anything left over. And that’s totally fair. Sometimes you go home, and you want to watch a show that rips your heart out. And sometimes you want to watch a show that you’re going to feel good at the end, and go to sleep and have good dreams. So we’re kind of doing both. I’ve told John, “Look, if this show fails because we’re just like everybody else, then that’ll be a bummer. But if it fails because we’re trying to do something different that people just don’t want to get down with, then I’m OK with that.”
You had a pretty physical role on Hawaii Five-0. Is this similar, in that you chase down bad guys and maybe put some of your black-belt skills to use? Or is it more detective work?
It’s a bit of both. But honestly, man, I’ve had so many injuries that I’m … I don’t want to say “slowing down,” but what I’m willing to risk my body for is getting … I don’t know. I look at Tom Cruise, and I’m like, “How’s this dude still doing all that @#$%?” So, yeah, I think there’s definitely a bit of both, but I’m not as quick to go, “Hey, I want to do that stunt.”