Jamie Foxx Missing Child Scare Inspired ‘Alert: Missing Persons Unit’
The new Fox drama Alert: Missing Persons Unit deals with every parent’s worst fear: missing children. Unfortunately, amber alerts are a reality in the world. In fact, it almost happened to executive producer Jamie Foxx and his child.
Foxx introduced a Zoom panel for Alert: Missing Persons Unit on Dec. 14. Then he turned it over to executive producer John Eisendrath to explain the real-life elements the show presents. Alert: Missing Persons Unit premieres Jan. 8 after NFL football and airs Mondays at 8 p.m. starting Jan. 9.
After missing child scare, Jamie Foxx pitched ‘Alert: Missing Persons Unit’
Eisendrath explained how the entire premise of Alert: Missing Persons Unit almost came from a nearly tragic true story. Fortunately, the real-life incident resolved with Foxx’s child returning safely, but just going through it was terrifying enough for Foxx. Foxx’s partner, Datari Turner, pitched the show to Eisendrath.
“He explained to me that Jamie had had an experience one afternoon where he thought his child had gone missing,” Eisendrath said. “And it was not the case, but for about six or seven hours, he wasn’t sure what had happened. Once that had occurred, he did some investigating about the people who find missing persons, and it fascinated him. He always thought, I don’t know how many years ago it was, but that it would be a good basis for a TV show. And that was basically what Datari told me.”
1 true story that inspired an ‘Alert: Missing Persons Unit’ episode
Alert: Missing Persons Unit stars Dania Ramirez and Scott Caan as Philadelphia detectives searching for missing people. Eisendrath said episode 2 draws from real life cases of fentanyl overdoses.
“There are a lot of cases that we can draw from if we chose to do just ripped from the headlines,” Eisendrath said. “Episode 2 is a story about fentanyl and the overuse of it and the scourge of fentanyl in America today, which I think is very topical. So some of the episodes are definitely ripped from the headlines. And some of them have that kind of connection to, I hope, what a lot of people are thinking about, talking about, and in some ways as a parent worried about for their kids. “
Writing new kidnapping stories
For the episodes of Alert: Missing Persons Unit that are not directly inspired by true stories, Eisendrath has another overriding theme. Caan and Ramirez’s characters have been searching for their missing son for six years. So many of the weekly cases inform their own case.
“A lot of the cases are picked, in part, because of the way that they impact Scott and Dania’s characters as it relates to their own personal story,” Eisendrath said. “Again, episode 2, as an example of a parent who’s facing the question of what would, in this case, she do if she came into a room with the person who’d killed her child. And that is a question that Scott’s character and Dania’s as well are both wrestling with. What would they do if they were ever put in a room with the person who took their child?”
Other cases, however, deal with the possibility that some missing people weren’t taken.
“Some of it is just based on what we think would make for just the most urgent, heart pounding case that we can think of and the ones that have the highest stakes,” Eisendrath said. “Some cases, people are taken and are desperate to be found, some cases, people are running away and are desperate not to be found. That’s part of the mystery that our characters have to unpack each week. So some of it’s ripped from the headlines. And some of it is just what is just the coolest, most urgent, most desperate case we can think of.”
