(9,00C, ABC, Wednesday)

The Nine revolves around the hostages of a 52-hour bank-robbery-turned-standoff. There's the bank manager and his daughter. The hospital social worker and her surgeon (ex?)boyfriend. The cop and the ADA. The teller and her now-dead sister. The man who was going to commit suicide but instead emerged a hero.

The first quarter of the pilot dealt primarily with how and why these particular people happened to be in the bank at the end of that particular business day. The cop's depositing his paycheck while placing bets. The surgeon decides the line at the ATM is too long. The ADA is there helping out her high strung mother. The suicide-guy is trying to get a boat loan, to get some spark back in his life. The daughter doesn't go down the street like her father, the manager, tells her to. Then we see the robbery begin.

Then we see the robbery end and find out that it's 52 hours later. The police storm the place, shooting and killing one of the two robbers and shooting and injuring the other. The teller's sister has been shot, at some point, and the surgeon is working on her. The suicide-guy tackles one of the robbers. The cop is handcuffed to a pole in the middle of the floor. The ADA's hair has been asymetrically cut. The manager is in a sort of fugue state, silently, unblinkingly shielding his daughter.

We then watch as these people try to deal with what they've been though, how they band together and fall apart. Social worker girl is pregnant, and she was going to deliver the news to surgeon guy at dinner (alright, this is easily the hokiest part of the show, I admit). The daughter can't remember anything that happened, and her father is afraid for what occured, because he wasn't with her the entire time. The teller is having trouble dealing with the death of her sister, who had just agreed to go on a date with the cop after a long flirtation. The police department tries to buy the cop into silence about an aborted attempt that could have ended the siege 24 hours earlier. The ADA is sleeping with her boss, but becomes distant. The teller, grief-laden, seduces the surgeon, and, being a party girl already, goes on a bender. Suicide-guy finds his new lease on life, but his soul-crushing wife just doesn't get it.

Of all the dense new shows with multiple leads that I've watched this season, this is the only one that gets it right. The characters aren't interconnected from the start but are brounght together. They then form their own subgroups and cross-talk between them. Things get messy, but they all desperately want it to be simple. And most of all: we still don't know what happened in that bank, a little more of which will be revealed every week.

The show's well written, well acted (Tim Daly, Kim Raver, Scott Wolf and Jessica Collins, in particular), and terribly well edited. And best of all, I'm very curious to see how these people will bond and un-bond in the wake of this terrible trauma, in addition, of course, to being curious about just WTF happened in that damned bank.

Preliminary grade: A.