FBI: Derek Haas on Joining the CBS Drama

CBS freshman drama FBI underwent multiple showrunner changes last year: series creator Craig Turk exited after the pilot, with PERSON OF INTEREST’s Greg Plageman stepping in; Plageman left in October, with CHICAGO FIRE’s Derek Haas and CHICAGO P.D.’s Rick Eid taking over.

Both men have a long history with Dick Wolf-produced shows—Haas co-created the CHICAGO franchise, while Eid worked on the LAW & ORDER franchise, including a stint as SVU’s showrunner—but the move to co-run FBI was a surprise.

“For me, [the adjustment] was more coming in midway,” Haas says. “I think we came in during the seventh episode. I wasn’t planning on doing that when the summer ended. The kind of prep you would do over a month or two, we had to do in basically three days, which is read all the scripts, watch all the cuts we could watch at that point, meet the cast, meet the crew. A lot of the crew had worked on SVU or P.D., which I had worked on for the first three years, so that helped.”

“It was trying to quickly, quickly catch up and put out scripts that were going to be worthy of what had come before,” he continues. “It was a challenge.”

But after the crunch, things settled down. “Thankfully I have such a great staff here on both shows, in terms of writers you can lean on, and of course having Rick Eid on, who is running PD and co-[running] FBI with me made it pretty easy,” Haas says. “We already knew each other and really liked each other, and he’s such a fine writer and showrunner. It was stressful, especially in those first two weeks, but it couldn’t have worked out better.”

FBI, Tuesdays, 9/8c, CBS

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