ABC/Bob D’Amico(NEW YORK) — Ready to get sucked into a new series?
The new ABC show The Crossing, which debuts tonight, centers on a mysterious group of people who wash up on a beach in the Pacific Northwest. Turns out they’re refugees from the future and have traveled back in time to escape a war that has devastated America some 180 years from now.
Steve Zahn plays a local sheriff who discovers the refugees and investigates the strange goings-on in his small town. But Zahn says the show is much more than just a time travel drama.
“I just wish there was another word for time travel because whenever you say that you immediately put it in some kind of genre, or you paint it a certain way,” Zahn tells ABC Radio.
For him, The Crossing is “almost believable, in a weird sense.”
“The minute you think, ‘Uh, that can’t happen’ here, you’re doomed aren’t you?” he says, adding, “The idea of refugees floating up on our shores. Right here on Long Island. What would that feel like? What would that be like? If they were coming from Canada? And it could happen. It could happen easily.”
The show’s mysterious sci-fi premise is also earning it comparisons to Lost, but Zahn says this show “sits alone.” He calls the first season “patient” and “grounded” — which the first season of “Lost” definitely was not.
“This whole season is about this event, in this town, how it affects the refugees and how it affects the people in this small town,” he says. “That’s it.”
The Crossing premieres tonight at 10 p.m. ET on ABC.
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