"That's The Key Distinction:" CIA Showrunner Mike Weiss Compares The Show To FBI And Breaks Down That Wild Episode 1 Cliffhanger

The following contains spoilers for CIA Season 1 Episode 1, "Directed Energy"CIA showrunner Mike Weiss wanted to make the show feel different from FBI, even while retaining the central connection to both. At the heart of the show is the Odd Couple vibes of a by-the-books FBI agent who finds himself tasked with assisting a shady CIA agent in the field.

That mismatched pair are the emotional core of a show that teases a mole in the CIA's ranks, a series of international dangers, and plenty of tricky challenges for the heroes to overcome. During an interview with Screen Rant, CIA showrunner Mike Weiss broke down the central dynamic of the show, what inspired the central mole hunt, and what makes CIA so different from FBI.

How CIA Compares To FBI, Explained By Mike Weiss

While CIA may be a spin-off of FBI, showrunner Mike Weiss is quick to note the primary differences between the shows and their outlook on the world at large. "I think [those differences] are going to be super clear in the pilot," Weiss explained to Screen Rant. "I think Bill Goodman is played, I think, brilliantly by Nick Gehlfuss. This is a by-the-book career FBI agent who is stepping out of the black-and-white world of FBI casework and into the shadowy world of CIA operations."

At the FBI, they work cases. At the CIA, they tackle operations. It's much looser. It's more shadowy. The goals are less clear in a fun way, because it's not clear exactly who the bad guys are, what they want, and where they're going to be when we need to stop them from doing whatever the heck it is they're trying to do. If you watch two hours, going from FBI right into CIA every week, I think the shows are going to feel pleasantly distinct from each other. They're going to have some similarities.

For Weiss, a lot of that fun stems from the moral boundaries that CIA is willing to cross that FBI can't. "Both shows, I think, have really great, crisp cinematography. Both shows are propulsive. They're going to be action sequences in both shows, but I think watching an FBI agent try to figure out how to move through the shadowy world of CIA operations, where there's never going to be a trial and the bad guy might not wind up in handcuffs, that's going to be interesting."

"The bad guy might start out as a threat and end as an untrustworthy ally at the end of the episode. Every day, we're going to see the CIA keep the world safe in unconventional ways...We're going to be seeing our characters leave the country in CIA. We're going to see a lot of threats come from overseas and find their way into New York. We're going to see things in New York that have ramifications on the global stage, but at the same time, we're going to have real people caught up in the games that bad actors on the global stage play."

CIA is directly building on FBI, highlighting the implicit differences between the organizations and their approach to crime fighting. Reflecting on the chances of those shows crossing over, Weiss was quick to explain that a big part of that difference is how the organizations can interact and influence each other. "There's kind of a magic door that exists that Bill Goodman is invited to go through into the CIA. He's invited to go from a black and white world [of FBI] into a world where everything is gray, and everything is in the shadows."

"I think part of the fun is that we're hoping for a lot of crossover. We're hoping to make it clear that Bill started his career at 26 Fed, and he knows all of the characters on FBI. Those are people that he's collaborated with on cases over the last couple of years when he was a special agent. There's this magic door, and he's able to go through into the CIA, but not everyone from FBI gets to go through that door."

You have to be invited in, whereas on CIA, those characters can travel through whenever they want. I'm hoping that people get the feel for how that works as the show evolves... FBI is a show that has to take place in broad daylight. Everything that the FBI does, it needs to be sanitized by daylight, whereas there are things that happen on CIA that no one's going to find out about. I think it's part of the fun. It's something that Bill is going to have to wrap his head around. You might save the day on CIA, but there's never going to be a press conference, because no one can even know that we were here. That's the key distinction between the two shows.

A big part of CIA is going to be rooted in the hunt for a mole, with the cliffhanger of the pilot suggesting one of the major characters in the show may not be what they appear. A big part of that development stemmed from plotting out the season after nailing the character of Colin Glass and what it means to be someone who is always hiding secrets. "I think that when you meet Tom, who could not be a nicer guy — but as Colin Glass, he's really good at indicating that he knows a lot of things that he has no interest in telling."

"The audience gets to wonder, 'What else does he know that he's not telling us?' Out of that, and out of the notion that all of these characters in the CIA have secrets that they guard closely, the mole hunt storyline grew naturally. We were like, 'As long as we're going to be indicating that these people have secrets, why don't we get specific?' So we created a specific secret, a specific backstory behind everything, and then let Bill have to puzzle it out with the audience."

Duos, Friendships, And Surprises In CIA

Glass and Goodman are just the latest duo to headline a Dick Wolf show. Part of the legacy of franchises like Law & Order is the way it often functions as a double-hander, with two partners working through their own issues together while uniting to get the job done. "We're super proud of the duos," Weiss admitted, acknowledging the way it's been a central element of many of the shows in the Dick Wolf universe of shows.

I worked on Chicago PD a long time ago, which had these great multiple duos at work in the show. It was super fun to work those dynamics into FBI. Dick Wolf had an idea from the very beginning that he wanted the show to really be a two-hander. He wanted it to be a straight-laced FBI agent who teams up with a shadowy CIA agent. From the very beginning, it was that dynamic. It's baked into the concept. I think we got the exact right two actors for it. They're such nice guys. They're so magnetic individually, but I think that together, their friction and their differences and their similarities and their different points of view on cases, the audience is going to be laser focused on that.

If Bill thinks X and Colin thinks Y, who's right? Could they both be right? Where do those opinions come from, and how do they play out over the course of a story? I think that's going to be the heart of the show. They have some amazing other characters to bounce off that I'm also excited for people to meet in the show. Necar Zadegan, as the deputy chief of the station, is phenomenal, and I think she is going to ground the show and lend a kind of sophistication and elegance that is specific to CIA. We love her.

Reflecting on the biggest surprises they encountered during the development and production of CIA, Weiss reflected on the little ways the show changed and grew, and evolved over time. "You always set out with a goal in mind, a destination if you will. Sometimes you wind up at some version of the destination. Sometimes you wind up someplace else. Always along the way, you find yourself in situations that you couldn't have predicted. I think that the thing that I've been most surprised about working on CIA is that there's an emotional center."

"At the heart of each one of these high-concept CIA operations that we've been writing and that we've been filming, I've been surprised by how emotional those storylines can be. Whether it's an ordinary person who finds themselves in an extraordinary situation or an extraordinary person who finds themselves in a chaotic plot that they can't control anymore, or any variation thereof. The people at the heart of each one of these CIA stories are in these really intense, emotional storylines, and I think I wasn't fully prepared for that part of it."