Last month before the holidays, IGN and a handful of other outlets were invited to visit the Burbank set of Intelligence , CBS's spy-fi action-drama series starring Lost's Josh Holloway, which debuts January 7th before moving to its regular Monday night timeslot on January 13th. We chatted with the show's creator and executive producer Michael Seitzman, fellow EPs Tripp Vinson and Barry Schindel, as well as stars Holloway, Meghan Ory (Once Upon a Time), Marg Helgenberger (CSI), John Billingsley (Star Trek: Enterprise) and P.J. Byrne (The Legend of Korra).

Holloway plays Gabriel Vaughn, a high-tech intelligence operative who's been enhanced with a supercomputer microchip in his brain, giving him access to the World Wide Grid (basically, a comprehensive network of valuable information and tech support). As a primary field agent, Gabriel works for Lillian Strand (Helgenberger), director of U.S. Cyber Command and a top secret tech branch known only as Clockwork. Viewing Gabriel as an incredibly valuable asset, Lillian hires Secret Service agent Riley Neal (Ory) to protect him and act as his partner and personal bodyguard.

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“ It used to be an expression, 'Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans,' and it became 'Life is what happens when your nose is in your smartphone.'

Josh Holloway as Gabriel Vaughn

“ Probably the biggest thing you're doing with a character that has an ability is defining what he

Seitzman pitched the show as kind of a Six Million Dollar Man for the Information Age. "In that [show's] case, it was physical strength, which was something in the '70s that meant something different than it would mean today," Seitzman explained. "In a world where you can press a button and a drone five miles up can kill a man on the ground, does super physical strength matter as much? Probably not... So while we have a very strong, athletic, military, experienced character, the idea of being able to access the same information grid just in a different way than the rest of us do was incredibly compelling.""We try not to hit it too hard on the head, because if you get too philosophical, it stops being a fun show," Seitzman added. "But if you're just philosophical enough, if you pay just enough attention to it, it becomes interesting, and it becomes a part of what makes the character tick. It also becomes a part of the fear of the other characters. It becomes a story engine that generates problems for our characters, which is good. You're always trying to generate problems for them to solve. But we ask the question all the time, 'What does it mean for the character when he's facing the fact that he's not completely him?' We thread that through the whole season."However, in a world now saturated with supernatural TV shows, the creators have to tread lightly with Gabriel's seemingly infinite potential abilities, lest they fall prey to the Superman Syndrome. "Probably the biggest thing you're doing with a character that has an ability is defining what he can't do, as opposed to what he can do," Seitzman said. "You try to approach it from that angle. Storytelling is conflict management. The tension's always going to come from what he can't do, from what other people can't do. You know, you get a certain amount of satisfaction and wish fulfillment from the things that he can do, but a lot of what you're doing is trying to frustrate."On creating Gabriel's unique organic interface -- "Gabriel-vision," if you will -- Seitzman gave most of the credit to the pilot's director David Semel. "He's remarkably talented," Seitzman said. "We spent a lot of time sitting down, trying to figure out what [Gabriel] would see, how he would see it, how it would manifest itself... I think we were mindful of that in terms of what Gabriel experiences in his head; how do we make that visually compelling for the audience and understandable for the audience, and how do we articulate for them all of that information in a way that also felt like the world that you're in every day."So it's been really fun. Our visual effects company is called Zoic, and they're really terrific. We've created a very real visual vocabulary for him that you become used to very quickly. So the big idea for that was that he's always seeing that stuff, it's just what he chooses to focus on. So Dave used to say, if you hold your thumb in front of your nose, and I look at you, I can't see my thumb, but I know it's there. But if I focus on my thumb, I see my thumb; I know you're there, but I'm not looking at you. That's the way that Gabriel interacts with all the stuff that is coming out of his chip."

Continued on Page 2, as Holloway explains his return to TV after Lost, while Ory and Helgenberger talk about their characters...