New Series ‘Rabbit Hole’ Crafted To Resemble A ‘70s Espionage Thriller

Get ready to sit on the edge of your seat.

This is exactly what the creatives behind the new series Rabbit Hole want every viewer to do.

“We kept saying in the writers’ room, ‘we want people to sit forward when they watch the show. We don’t want them to relax and feel comfortable. We want them to be questioning where is the reality and drawing their own conclusions. That’s what we really wanted,” says executive producer and showrunner John Requa.

In Rabbit Hole, nothing is what it seems as John Weir, a master of deception in the world of corporate espionage, is framed for murder and finds himself at the center of a shadowy conspiracy.

Keifer Sutherland stars as Weir in the series.

Requa says that in creating the series he and fellow EP and showrunner Glenn Ficarra were influence by ‘70s espionage thrillers.

Ficarra adds that, “all really started with our agent saying, ‘You know, I think Kiefer Sutherland’s looking for something.’ And within 30 seconds John spits out, ‘What about a guy who manipulates reality for a living, who gets caught up in something that isn’t what it seems?’”

He reveals that, “When we were writing the show, we were working with Kiefer. We had pitched him the show before we wrote it. Well, we had written the first episode, but we still had him in mind.”

Describing their main character, Ficarra says that, “John Weir is a very tricky character. He’s oftentimes an unreliable narrator. I think that helps you immensely when you have a character who is going into murky waters and coming out. It was incredibly beneficial and important for us to be able to have a character that could exist in this world and do questionable things, but you’re still on his side.”

Comparing Rabbit Hole to Sutherland’s former series, the hugely popular-during-its-run 24, Requa explains, “The real difference for me on a show like Rabbit Hole compared to the different iterations that television is going through, certainly from the beginning of 24, is that we are not as restricted in what kind of stories we can tell, and we’re not restricted about how we tell them either, whether that be language or sensuality or even violence. Those restrictions, certainly with streaming, have been lessened. The option is there, and somehow it makes you feel different.”

Part of the storytelling in the series involves moving back and forth in time, with Ficarra saying that he and Requa ‘learned a lot on This Is Us about trafficking in flashback.’

He says that, “we would write the past just to understand our characters. In this, it’s a very important part of it, because we’re seeing a story unfold in the past, or several stories unfold in the past, that lead to this moment and they inform that moment.”

Sutherland believes that people are drawn to espionage shows because, “Well, it’s a world that most of us don’t know about.”

He explains that when he and the creatives started talking about the series, the 1975 film Three Days of the Condor came up.

“There were so many different reasons that I love that movie,” explains Sutherland. “But in that specific instance, the idea that the person who was in charge of knowing all their secrets was somehow having these secrets used against him, is one of the great primal fears that I think we all individually have as human beings.”

He’s convinced that people just can’t help wondering if there’s ‘another world operating below or above the one that we’re just normally existing in.’

“Whether that’s true or not, we’ll be very interested in what that is,” he surmises, adding, “ And, certainly, we will always be envious of people who seemingly have more information than we do. So, for all of those reasons, I think spy films have captured people’s imagination going all the way back to the beginning of film in the ’20s.”

This is precisely why Requa says he and everyone behind Rabbit Hole, “want people to, feel like they’re in front of the show, so we can lure them down that road and then pull the rug out from under them. That’s the fun of the show.”

‘Rabbit Hole’ premieres Sunday, March 26^th on Paramount+