One of the biggest lessons of this fall season is that you don’t mess with Shonda Rhimes – in September, the Scandal creator delivered another major hit for ABC with the female-skewing, button-pushing drama How to Get Away with Murder. Elsewhere, Ioan Gruffudd-led procedural Forever sputtered. The apparent lesson? Girl power is definitely in. As it looks to the future, ABC hopes to keep that trend going by developing a female-led FBI drama under the name Ascension.
The network has handed a script order to the show, from writer and exec-producer Kevin O’Hare. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the drama centers on a brilliant but impulsive FBI agent named Alexa Reyes, who learns that a staggering amount of the country’s most brutal and violent offenders can be traced back to the resort town of Ascension, Florida. When she attempts to uncover the origin of the evil in Ascension, she’s confronted by her own haunted past, and forces far greater than she ever expected.
Sounds like an intriguing and unusually mythology-based premise for a procedural, but perhaps that ambition will serve the series well. After all, viewers didn’t flock to many of the grounded, realistic procedurals to bow this season, including Fox’s Gracepoint and NBC’s State of Affairs.