Note: This story contains spoilers from “Line of Fire” Episode 1.
“Line of Fire” creator Joshua Safran always knew the show’s pilot would end with a shocking reveal: The Hollingsworth family is being targeted by a trained assassin, and he happens to be one of their own.
NBC’s latest family drama dropped the bomb in the final moments of the series premiere, when Jane (Hope Davis) and Mike Hollingworth (Peter Krause) realized his son from another marriage is the suspect who just killed a man at their home. They opt to keep that information to themselves for now.
“When I pitched this iteration of the show that became ‘Line of Fire,’ [the twist] was baked into the premise immediately,” Safran told TheWrap. “There’s a lot more to the role than what you see in the pilot … not everything is what it appears to be.”
The series introduced viewers to Joel (Charlie Barnett), friendly neighbor to Clare Hollingworth’s (Kat Cunning) boyfriend Logan (Pico Alexander). After a chaotic first meeting between Logan and the Hollingsworths, he finds himself alone at their home. He is surprised by Joel, who hinted at Logan having a secret before stabbing and killing him.
The murder kicked off the central mystery for “Line of Fire,” which focuses on the lives and dynamics of the Hollingsworths, a family of law enforcement officers. Mike works for the secret service along with his son Micah (Tommy O’Brien). Clare is a special agent in the FBI and son Russ (Taylor Bloom) just started a job at the Department of Justice. Joel’s real name is Jack, a presumed dead member of the Hollingsworth family — and it’s clear that Jane and Mike know more about what’s going on.
Below, Safran spoke about returning to the fast world of broadcast TV production, where the Hollingsworths’ story goes after that reveal and more. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
TheWrap: You had been thinking about this project since college. How does it feel to see it get to this place, days away from premiering?
Safran: It’s pretty crazy. There’s two things at play. One is that this idea has been germinating inside me for a very long time, so to see it come out is very confusing to me, because I’ve stopped and started versions of it for decades. And then the second thing is I haven’t done broadcast in 12 years, so the idea that we are shooting while it’s airing is something I haven’t experienced since “Quantico.”
So my nerves or my anxiety or my fears about the premiere coming up aren’t just in the “Wow isn’t great that I made this thing.” It’s simply how fast it is. We just turned in Episode 2, and it airs a week from Monday. That is crazy. We’re shooting Episode 7 right now. We’re not that far ahead.
I’ve been waiting to talk to you about the big plot twist at the end of the pilot. The Hollingsworth family has another brother, presumed dead, who turns out to be the killer seemingly targeting them and other law enforcement. How did that twist come into play during the writing process?
When I pitched this iteration of the show that became “Line of Fire,” it was baked into the premise immediately. It wasn’t like, I want to do a show about a family of law enforcement agents, and oh, what should the twist be? Oh, it’ll be this. It was always going to be a family where one member of the family was seemingly a black sheep, and how you deal with that.
Like Jane says, “You can’t protect the world and the people you love in it at the same time.” You especially can’t keep an eye on your entire family and make sure that everybody goes the same way that you hope they will. So that was the idea that the series’s antagonist would be a part of them.
It’s about what a job in this line of duty can do to you. For some people, it makes you incredibly strong, patriotic, and believe in yourself. Other people see things that maybe they don’t like and it makes them uncomfortable. Other people are like, I never want to do that, and I think that power is bad. So it’s pretty much looking at the spectrum of what being in the line of duty does to you.
This reveal sets up quite the roller coaster ride for the Hollingworths, along with all the other twists we got in the premiere — from Clare losing her boyfriend to Micah’s relationship with Sparrow and Mike and Jane’s lingering and secret connection — where does this family go from here?
One of the things that was really important for me and the writers was to try to make a season of television that doesn’t ever go off the rails into anything too big. All respect to “Alias,” a show that I love. This isn’t “Alias.” It is more in “The West Wing,” “Diplomat” area of the world. So the conflicts that happen in the pilot do not resolve quickly, and I would say are, like with any family, embedded in them. They’re the dynamics that they share.
Mike and Jane might be separated, but they’re still playing out dynamics that they had when they were married. They’ve just come more to the forefront now, and so for many episodes they are dipping in and out of that dynamic. I’d say for all the episodes, all of them. And so Clare dealing with Logan and the fallout of losing her boyfriend. Then, as you know, the reveal of learning more about Logan isn’t done by Episode 3 and Clare begins a new relationship. We’re breaking Episode 11 in the room, and she’s still dealing with aspects of what happened to Logan. So we are trying to really make a full season that tells one story.
I’m learning from my own mistakes. I love “Quantico” as a TV show, but it burned through a ton of storytelling in three seasons. So here we have our eye on making sure that these family dynamics and emotional dynamics of the characters are so relatable and so deep and rich that we don’t have to invent new ones all the time. That we actually have a lot of runway with the ones they have right now. Clare, a person whose job it is to be able to read a room and see when someone’s lying, missed something so close to her, and that is going to change her forever. She’s not going to get a pep talk in Episode 2 and be totally fine in Episode 3. This is not that show.
With “Line of Fire,” you’re bringing back the messy family drama to broadcast TV, in the network home of “Parenthood” and “This Is Us.” Does this type of show about a family need a crime and mystery component to get made today?
Well, this one did.
All great family soaps revolved around a business, whether even going back to “Dallas” and oil. So the twist here is it’s law enforcement. I’m very interested in how you bring your job home with you, whatever that is. Whether it’s Broadway musicals on “Smash,” they’re going out at the bar after the show at midnight, and that’s when the s–t’s going to go down. It’s not happening while they’re doing their job on stage. On “Gossip Girl,” school was a procedural element and then what happened after school was where the soap was.
So I just feel like I always like a day and a night, meaning who you are by day and who you are by night, and so this is kind of just another soap. It just happens to also have a case every week. I love the case stuff. It’s really fun to break cases. But the soap happening during the case is what I love, or when the case lines up emotionally with something that one of the characters is dealing with. That stuff’s so fun. That’s life.
“Line of Fire” airs Mondays on NBC and streams the next day on Peacock.
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