Tim Minear

LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) The former soundstages of the cult hit "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," located in converted warehouses in a light-industrial area of Santa Monica, Calif., have seen a lot of dangerous creatures in their time, mostly of the supernatural variety.

These days, there are still plenty of evil things, but without wings, horns or fangs.

On June 8, FOX premiered "The Inside," a Wednesday crime thriller series created by Tim Minear — whose production credits include the "Buffy" spinoff "Angel" and "Wonderfalls" — and Howard Gordon ("Angel," "24"). It finally hit the air after a lengthy development process that included a previous pilot and a complete change of concept, producers and cast, except for star Rachel Nichols. Click Here As reimagined by Minear and Gordon, who continues as a consulting producer, "The Inside" casts Nichols (the recent version of "The Amityville Horror") as Rebecca Locke, a childhood kidnapping survivor fast-tracked to the FBI’s Los Angeles Violent Crimes Unit by Supervisory Special Agent Virgil "Web" Webster (Peter Coyote), who seeks to exploit her past for the special gift it has given her to understand victims and villains. In fact, he’s chosen all his team members because of their idiosyncrasies.

Playing the rest of the special agents are Jay Harrington ("Coupling") as Paul Ryan, the "conscience" of the unit; Adam Baldwin ("Firefly") as Danny Love, the tactical leader, a former Marine; and Katie Finneran ("Wonderfalls") as detail-oriented psychologist Melody Sim.

"The crimes are epic and dark and huge," Minear says. "They’re not just going after somebody who murdered her husband; that’s not what it is. It’s predators, human monsters. So this was a way for me to do my next monster show, not using supernatural monsters, but using human monsters."

On this particular Friday afternoon — which cast and producers expect to extend into a very long Friday night — an episode called "Loneliest Number" is in production. Someone is killing callers to a suicide hotline, and as she’s done before, Rebecca decides to use herself as bait.

The unit’s computer expert, Carter Howard (Nelsan Ellis), is working his magic, scanning phone bills for commonalities among the victims. The number of a pizza parlor puts up a red flag.

"Terrific," Rebecca says. "They were suicidal and loved a stuffed crust. I think we’re really getting somewhere."

That’s an example of what Minear hopes to accomplish, blending elements of drama and humor. But that’s nothing new.

"There was comedy in ’Wonderfalls,’" he says, "but there was comedy in ’Angel.’ There was drama in ’Angel,’ but there was drama in ’Wonderfalls.’ Whatever it is I do, it’s pretty consistent. I don’t think going from something that’s considered an hour comedy, like ’Wonderfalls,’ to something that somebody might call a dark procedural with character is unusual. To me, it’s a very short step.

"Instead of talking tchotchkes, I have serial killers."

Minear also is a big fan of the movie "L.A. Confidential" and its novelist, James Ellroy, as well as "Chinatown" and "The Silence of the Lambs," elements of which show up in different ways in "The Inside." For example, the team works out of the Mulwray Federal Building, named after Hollis Mulwray, a "Chinatown" character whose death uncovered many secrets.

In a visual sense, the gruesomeness of "Lambs" has been front and center since the pilot (courtesy of "Buffy" and "Angel" makeup artist Robert Hall), which featured a woman with all the flesh removed from one hand and half her face cut off. Just to drive it home, Love made a crack about Rebecca being Clarice Starling, Jodie Foster’s FBI trainee from "Lambs."

"I was telling these guys," says Harrington during a break in filming on the FBI sets, "last night I was having nightmares. You can’t help it. You’re here all day. You’re talking about it and doing it. Then you get home, and the last thing on your mind is the face of a victim.

"After being here, working 15 hours, it’s just in your head. Then you watch TV for an hour and fall asleep, and you start dreaming of bodies or death."

Harrington says he also read Ellroy’s "The Black Dahlia," based on a famous Los Angeles murder case. Nichols, a Columbia University graduate with degrees in economics and applied mathematics, took a more analytical approach.

"I read books about children that were abducted," she says. "I have this one book, didn’t offer me a lot, but it was about the psychology of kidnap victims, just the way that certain parts of your brain are damaged when you go through something like that. The rest of your life, other parts of the brain are making up for those spots that were wounded.

"It’s surface-level things, the way you block things out, mechanisms to forget, recalling memories and what that does to you."

Ellis, who owns his own copy of "The Silence of the Lambs," feels right at home in the unlit corners of Minear’s imagination. "I love it," he says. "I’m a dark, dark lover. I tend to be attracted to the darker side of life. Tim said he was, so am I."

While he may have started with serial killers, Minear doesn’t plan to stop there. "We’re doing violent crimes. We can do serial killers, but we can do arsonists, mad bombers, terrorists, rapists. There are all manner of sick and twisted deviant behaviors that we can explore for the enjoyment of America."