‘S.W.A.T. Exiles’ Boss Teases Mole Mystery & Explains Spinoff’s New Tone

“We weren’t simply bringing Hondo back. It was showing audiences a Hondo they haven’t seen before,” executive producer Jason Ning says of who Shemar Moore‘s character is when S.W.A.T. Exiles picks up two years after we last saw him leading 20-David.

After a botched raid resulted in the death of a young operator, Hondo was forced off S.W.A.T. But his former commander, Hicks (Patrick St. Esprit), brings I’m back to lead a new unit, made up of the “rejects”: gun-show influencer Sammy Bishop (Lucy Barrett), socially awkward tactical savant Ethan Cole (Freddy Miyares), the guarded Cassidy Reed (Zyra Gorecki), the wildcard who has a troubled past Jude Callan (Ronen Rubinstein), and ambitious Malik Anderson (Adain Bradley). But they’ve been brought together to fail.

“Hondo is the soul of S.W.A.T. and Shemar is the soul of Hondo, so once I knew what the show was going to be, the first thing I needed to know was, was Shemar really in? And I didn’t mean willing to show up and play Hondo, but I mean in for this version,” Ning tells TV Insider. “This isn’t the Hondo that’s comfortably running 20-David because he’s been through hell. He’s lost people, his faith in this institution that he’s devoted his life to has been shaken, and he stepped away. And so then we give him the last thing he wants, an impossible group of young recruits who challenge how he thinks leadership is supposed to work. And I think that’s what really excited both of us.”

Courtesy of Starz

He continues, “Shemar really embraced going deeper and playing a Hondo who’s angrier and more wounded and more vulnerable.”

The trailer reveals that there is a mole, and we’ll see how Hondo contends with that. That arc, a serialized one, is something that S.W.A.T. Exiles can do since it’s no longer a broadcast show.

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“We wanted to innovate the storytelling a little bit from the original,” says Ning while also acknowledging the success of the original show. “And so a good part of that is that we wanted to change the tone and the format of Exiles a bit, which is, I describe it as a prestige character wearing tactical gear. One of the things that I was adamant about was that, and people shouldn’t be embarrassed about [it], is that it is a procedural. There’s a reason people love that. But what streaming lets us do is marry that accessibility with deeper serialization.”

We’ll see that in trauma carrying over if something happens to a character in one episode, in addition to missions-of-the-week. “The characters keep moving forward and you’re allowed to have a story that carries throughout the whole season,” he explains. “Each week, they have these dangerous situations, but underneath that, there’s this season-long question of, why was this particular team assembled and why does it increasingly feel like they were handpicked to fail? Hondo begins to realize there might be something larger happening around them. So, the story keeps tightening as the episodes go, and there will be twists that force the team to question who they can trust and who’s really protecting whom. And it all builds to a finale where we got to do some of the biggest and most ambitious action of the season.”

S.W.A.T. Exiles, Series Premiere, Friday, September 25, Starz