Now that the complete first season of Countdown is out, it’s time to look ahead to, hopefully, a second. (Prime Video has yet to renew the drama.) And when TV Insider spoke with creator Derek Haas about that wild finale, we had to bring up another one of his shows, FBI: International, and how much of a bummer it is that it was canceled after four seasons.
“I was, too,” the show’s co-creator (he left after the second season) admitted. “It was really fun making it.”
But he did get to revisit his previous show while working on his current one, he shared. “Now the cool thing that I got to do is when we did the Europe scenes for Countdown, we shot in Budapest, and I got to go hang out with all the International people,” he said. That happened to coincide with when Jesse Lee Soffer, who took over as team boss after Luke Kleintank left, was there. “I knew [him] really well from Chicago P.D., so we got to have a nice — I got to have a little bit of closure before that shut down, but I don’t know why. You never know these things. It’s like the powers that be make these decisions. I loved the show, too. I thought it was really fun and cool show.”
When we brought up Haas bringing Soffer over to Countdown, he immediately replied, “Believe me, that’s crossed my mind. I don’t know that we can get him, but that would be really fun. I guess he was an Army Ranger also, and it’s like maybe he and Meachum [Jensen Ackles] were in the same unit. It was like a Halstead Meachum reunion. That sounds awesome. Crossover!”
Whether it’s Soffer as someone or another character, each new personality of the task force makes for dynamic scenes. Haas agreed.
“I learned that doing the Chicago shows. Anytime you bring in somebody new, you get a whole new dynamic shift in the traits of the group. I always loved that on Chicago Fire,” he said. “I think about Stella Kidd [Miranda Rae Mayo] on that show. She came in Season 3, now she’s the star, front of the poster of that show. So it just feels like we’ve got worlds that we could still explore on this one. So fingers crossed.
Would you want to see Jesse Lee Soffer on Countdown? Let us know in the comments section below.
Countdown, Season 1, Streaming Now, Prime Video