THE fall TV season officially begins on Sept. 18, but Fox kicks off its new line-up Monday at 8 p.m. with the sophomore return of "Prison Break" and what the network hopes will be another action-adventure, thrill-a-minute-mystery, "Vanished," at 9 p.m. ("24" returns in January.)
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JOSH BERMAN certainly had the pedigree. He received two Emmy nominations during his six years as a "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" writer-producer. By age 26, he had earned a bachelor's degree in public policy from Princeton University, a master's in history as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Sydney in Australia, and an MBA and law degree from Stanford.
But it was his 7 1/2 -inch, meticulously indexed research binder that sold Fox on his new mystery thriller and has landed him a coveted time slot on the fall prime-time schedule.
Berman, 36, is the creator of "Vanished," an edge-of-your-seat drama centered on the wife (Joanne Kelley) of a prominent Georgia senator (John Allen Nelson) who goes missing. Her disappearance turns out to be part of a much, much larger conspiracy, dating back thousands of years.
Berman pitched the idea for the show last summer to Fox President of Entertainment Peter Liguori, but his was no ordinary outline. Not only was his plot developed over 10 episodes, Berman had pages and pages of historical, forensic, religious and political research as well as minor details, such as the types of guns that FBI agents use and the uniforms tactical teams wear.
"I've never seen anything like it," Liguori said. "I was really impressed."
Berman says he wasn't trying to show off. His binders are his "security blankets," and now that the first series he is running is well into production, he's got several more on his desk. "When you're holding your answers, you know you can just look it up," he said recently while on the Paramount lot, sitting on the set of the fictional FBI office created for the new series. "It's all about a good table of contents. My binders are organized so that anything I need, if I want to suddenly find research on how long it takes to defrost a body, it's at my fingertips. It's an efficiency issue."
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Launched at a lunch
BERMAN was still at "CSI" when he struck a four-year deal to create pilots at 20th Century Fox Television. His goal was always to write and produce his own show, one involving a serialized mystery. The key plot point was born at a lunch meeting last year with his studio boss, Dana Walden, co-president of 20th Century Fox Television, when they began discussing their mutual fascination with the way the media treats cases of missing women.
