Baird Joins The 4400
Ira Steven Behr, executive producer of USA Network's SF series The 4400, told SCI FI Wire that the upcoming fourth season will introduce a new regular character, played by Australian actress Jenni Baird. Baird (Conviction) will play Meghan Doyle, the new head of the National Threat Assessment Command, or NTAC, for which Tom Baldwin (Joel Gretsch) works.
Baird's Doyle is the third commander of the government agency charged with monitoring the 4,400 people who were abducted, then returned in a ball of light, with new superhuman abilities; the previous directors were Dennis Ryland (Peter Coyote) and Nina Jarvis (Samantha Ferris).
"They liked Peter Coyote quite a bit," Behr said in an interview in Hollywood on May 30. "I thought Peter was kind of phoning it in when he was doing the head-of-NTAC thing. It's only after he left NTAC and became Dennis Ryland, the man who's trying to save the world from the 4400, that the character became interesting. But so they always felt that Nina Jarvis was neither fish nor fowl. And that's kind of our fault, because we kept saying we were going to do all these stories, give her all these interesting character quirks, and she kept being the finger-pointer. We never were able to develop the stories we wanted to. It always was the one-note finger-pointer kind of thing. And then they said, 'You know, we really want someone with some more sizzle.'"
Enter Meghan Doyle, who makes her first appearance in the fourth-season premiere "Wrath of Graham" as a Fellini-loving, rule-breaking outsider who threatens to upset the careful order of the quasi-law-enforcement establishment of NTAC.
And it's no accident that Doyle is an attractive blonde. "I had the bright idea that Meghan, this new character, could give us a new head of NTAC and would also give us someone for Tom to ultimately get involved with, because, goddamn it, we're going to make a romantic pairing on this show work if I have to go in there and do it myself," Behr said.
Baird joins a returning cast that also includes Billy Campbell, Jacqueline McKenzie, Patrick Flueger, Chad Faust, Megalyn Echikunwoke and Conchita Campbell. The 4400 kicks off its fourth season on June 17 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.