Tonight at 9PM (ET), CBS premieres Reckless, a new drama set in Charleston, S.C., where a Yankee litigator from the North and a charming Southern attorney must hide their intense mutual attraction as a police sex scandal threatens to tear the city apart. The show stars Anna Wood, Cam Gigandet, Shawn Hatosy, Adam Rodriguez, Georgina Haig, Kim Wayans, Gregory Harrison and Michael Gladis.
Some of those names in this cast list may have played cops in cop shows of the past, but audiences shouldn’t expect the expected when they see familiar faces. “When we cast the actors, obviously they played cops but the reality is – one of the things we are proud of in this show – is nobody is exactly what you think they are. The villains aren’t all villains and the good guys aren’t all good guys,” Executive Producer Ian Sander said at the CBS Summer Press Day earlier this summer. “And the fact that these two actors are able to bring so many levels to the show, it wasn’t about being cops, it was about being people that are multi-level. This is a show that you may think you know where it is going and I can assure you that it is going somewhere else.”
Shawn Hatosy, in particular, notes that his character is very different from the one he played on Southland, and that the audience reaction will certainly be different. “I played a cop on a show that — he’s a beloved character in Los Angeles,” Hatosy said. “I can put it to you this way; one day I was standing on the side of LaBrea and Wilshire on my skateboard and I looked over and there was a police officer in a car who looked at me and he said, ‘Sammy,’ which is the name of the character I played, and he said, ‘Cops don’t ride sskateboards.’ The difference with that and this show is after they watch Reckless, I have a feeling that that same cop would probably look at me and throw me in handcuffs and maybe spit on me.”
Beyond different characters, the producers promise a very different feeling in the show’s location in South Carolina. “It’s beachy and the history is really seductive,” creator and executive producer Dana Stevens says. “And it’s fantastic to be in these buildings that people lived in in the Civil War. You are walking on the Battery. People used to sit out there and watch the battles go on during the Civil War. As a writer, I’m very inspired by history, so I love that,” she says.
Reckless premieres tonight (June 29) at 9PM ET on CBS. Here’s the trailer:
