What would you do if you were the surgeon assigned to the save the life of the current US President, only to come home and realize that your family has been taken hostage and if you don’t do what’s in your power as the chief surgeon assigned to the President, and kill the Commander in Chief, your family will be killed?  That’s exactly what Dr Ellen Sanders (Toni Collette) will have to figure out this season on CBS’ newest drama series HOSTAGES when she and her family become just that (hostages…) for Dylan McDermott’s kind-of-maybe-not-so-bad guy and his team of equally enigmatic bad guys featuring MToT favorites Billy Brown and Rhys Coiro (ENTOURAGE).  As the episode spirals on, you see that the drama comes from many more places than the hostage situation at hand, as the family secrets are about to be spilled all over the fancy carpet and hardwood floor.

As far as drama goes, the first hour of HOSTAGES is perfectly compelling – you don’t know where loyalties of the characters lie, and therefore, it’s unclear before the hour is up just who exactly you should root for.  It’s even a bit of a departure from the CBS dramas we’re used to, as the “story of the week / procedural element” doesn’t feel as enforced here.  Toni Collette is never not fantastic; Tate Donovan deserves a show that’s as good as he is (and this might be it);  like I mentioned, Dylan McDermott may or may not be the actual bad guy in the show – it’s never made fully clear.  To say much more about the show would give some of the “twists” of the premiere away, but I will say that the show had some tense scenes that could be fun to watch play out, and as of right now, I’m unsure just where the show goes after 13 episodes, let alone in the long run.  For me, it might be 2 and out, but we’ll see where it goes next week!