TV: The Nine

The best of this year's new crop of serialized dramas; it is, even more than most of them, strongly influenced by Lost, but it wears that influence very well.

We start in a bank. It's almost closing time on Friday afternoon, and most of the tellers have already gone home; there are only a handful of customers left. Nick (Tim Daly), a cop with a gambling problem, has come in to deposit his paycheck and to flirt with teller Eva (Lourdes Benedicto); her sister Franny (Camille Guaty), also a teller at the bank, eggs them on. Egan (John Billingsley) is talking to branch manager Malcolm (Chi McBride) about taking out a loan to buy a boat, but is terrified that his wife won't approve; Malcolm is interrupted when his teenage daughter Felicia (Dana Davis) comes in.

Surgeon Jeremy (Scott Wolf) and his social-worker girlfriend Lizzie (Jessica Collins) are on their way to a late lunch, where she plans to tell him that she's pregnant. And district attorney Kathryn (Kim Raver) has come to help her mother (Susan Sullivan, very funny in a small guest role), who's convinced that the bank has stolen jewelry from his safe-deposit box.

Two men suddenly pull guns, and a robbery is under way. We jump forward 52 hours to see people leaving the bank. One of the hostages and one of the robbers are rushed to the hospital; the other robber, Lucas (Owain Yeoman), is taken to jail.

It's clear that a lot has happened during those 52 hours, and while it's not surprising that such an experience would have bonded the hostages, they seem to have become an even more tight-knit group than we'd have expected. People and relationships have changed: Egan is no longer a doormat; Lizzie and Jeremy are no longer a couple; Felicia claims not to remember anything that happened during those 52 hours.

The characters are a great assortment, and the cast is a fine mix of TV veterans and newcomers. Billingsley makes a particularly strong impression in the first episode as Egan; finding out how he went from hen-pecked patsy to hero will be one of the most entertaining storylines of the show.

And we will find out eventually; in the style of Lost, each episode will mix the ongoing story of these characters which flashbacks to some piece of those 52 hours. That can be an annoying way to tell a story, requiring as it does that all of the characters carefully avoid talking about their own pasts until the writers decide we should be let in on some new piece of the puzzle. But the first episode is so strongly done that I'm betting these writers can pull off the trick. If nothing else, they know how to end with an unexpected twist; the final shot of the first episode is the best jaw-dropper of the new season.