Eleventh Hour From CBS: An Expensive Gamble?

Eleventh Hour is an adaptation of a British mini-series that starred Star Trek The Next Generation’s Patrick Stewart and comes to us from producer Jerry Bruckheimer.  It follows Dr. Jacob Hood (played by Rufus Sewell), a biophysicist and special science adviser to the government.  His job is to investigate scientific crises and oddities.  (Sniff, sniff… do I smell an X-Files fragrance in the air?)

He’s like a dog on a bone when he pursues those who abuse scientific breakthroughs for their own gain and usually, when he’s called in, it’s at the last minute (The Eleventh Hour) when things go wrong and there’s no other option.  (Like Mulder, but with some umph?)

Special Agent Rachel Young (played by Marley Shelton) is the FBI officer who watches Hood’s back (hello…  Scully??).

I find it very refreshing that now we’ve skipped over remakes, and are just doing re-do’s of popular British series’. [end sarcasm]

The details I find most interesting are the rumors of financial costs being committed:

• A $4 million pilot budget
• Just under $2 million per episode budget
• CBS has already bought 13 episodes.

On top of those costs, there was a bidding war between ABC and CBS.

CBS won the bidding war. That win though, is thought to be one of the biggest television deals in history.  For the rights to the series, CBS is rumored to have paid between $25 to $30 million.

I’m not always that smart about some things, but from what I read over on Variety,  regardless of the CBS production commitment, if the show doesn’t perform as they expect/hope, the studio could be on the hook for this huge production deficit.

Zoinks!  That’s an immense amount of faith.  It sounds like they wanted to jump in the ring and compete with Fox’s Fringe from J.J. Abrams.  Regardless, Eleventh Hour brings the original CSI team of Bruckheimer and director Danny Cannon back together, and if they tap that same magic they hit with the CSI franchise, it might be a show to watch out for (and make ends meet for the network)!

The show will be executive produced by Bruckheimer, Jonathan Littman, Danny Cannon, Cyrus Voris, Ethan Reiff and Mick Davis for Jerry Bruckheimer Television in association with Warner Bros. Television.

I will give this a once or twice over and see how it pans out.  We could use a good replacement for X-Files, whether it be Eleventh Hour or Fringe, we’ll see who wins out in the long run, if either one!

Eleventh Hour, will air on CBS Thursdays at 10pm starting October 9th

Sources: Eleventh Hour, MovieWeb,

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or if you want more frequent updates follow us on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!