New ABC spy drama, ‘Whiskey Cavalier,’ sprinkled with comedy
ABC's "Whiskey Cavalier" stars Scott Foley as Will Chase and Lauren Cohan as Frankie Trowbridge.
ABC's "Whiskey Cavalier" stars, from left, Vir Das as Jai Datta, Josh Hopkins as Ray Prince, Scott Foley as Will Chase, Lauren Cohan as Frankie Trowbridge, Tyler James Williams as Edgar Standish, and Ana Ortiz as Susan Sampson.
ABC's "Whiskey Cavalier " stars Lauren Cohan as Francesca "Frankie" Trowbridge and Scott Foley as Will Chase.
In what looks to be the best mid-season show on ABC, Scott Foley (“Scandal”) and Lauren Cohan (“The Walking Dead”) star in “Whiskey Cavalier.”
This spy drama, sprinkled with comedy, is a fun mix of characters and stories as an FBI agent is teamed with a CIA agent to form a new crew tasked with saving the world
The series is mainly filmed in Prague, which is a unique city that can double as almost any city in Europe. Both Foley and Cohan recently met with members of the media just before returning to Europe to resume filming their series.
Foley’s character is a man who wears his heart on his sleeve. This is a little departure from the tough manly FBI agents we have seen previously. When we first meet him, he has just broken up with his fiancé.
“I think he carries the weight of the experience with him,” Foley said, “but it’s not a constant in the episodes you’re going to see in the first season. It was really a great way to introduce a different side to a leading action man, and I thought it was an interesting way to jump into the show.”
Foley likes the fact that his character is not the stern save-the-world manly type like, perhaps, James Bond.
“I have a very strong belief that it’s time to sort of reinvent that trope that is the leading man in an action series,” Foley said. “To me, at least, (it’s) something unrelatable to a lot of the tropes you see in the men that we know to save the world on the television shows we grew up on. This is something that I think is modern and more interesting, for me at least. It’s much more relatable to have a character like this than someone sort of stoic instead.”
Cohan’s character is a tough, no-nonsense agent. She thinks she can handle any situation by herself. What she learns is that perhaps she might need a little help.
“The fun part is that she’s consistently unwilling to admit that she does begin to trust him, and that upends everything that she is built on, this emotional independence,” Cohan said. “But it’s undeniable they work together so well as a team. So as the series progresses, at least as this first season progresses, (she) acquiesces to that truth. And, you know, then we see if they can actually be friends.”
Adding comedy to the stories is what was appealing to Foley.
“I wasn’t interested in just doing an action show or a drama. I wanted to do a show that reminded me of the shows that I grew up watching, ‘Remington Steele,’ ‘Moonlighting,’ ‘Hart to Hart,’ ‘Simon & Simon.’ I miss those light one-hour shows. And for me, I wouldn’t be interested in doing this if the comedy wasn’t there.”
“Whiskey Cavalier” is a fun and interesting new series. It premieres Wednesday on ABC.