Ever wondered what the heck a “whiskey cavalier” is?
The ABC series makes its official debut tonight, after premiering a preview after the Oscars, and you have some questions about that title, which actually refers to the main character’s call sign. For star Scott Foley, it was one major thing he didn’t want to be changed about the show.
“I loved it,” Foley told E! News during ABC’s TV Critics Association press tour. “It stands out, it’s not for everybody, but it’s original. One thing I said early in the process was don’t change the name. I could see them wanting to change it to The Bureau or something something like that, which it’s not. This is a semi-irreverent action comedy.”
As Foley explains in the video above, your Whiskey Cavalier spy name is your favorite drink + plus the name of your first pet. (Nice to meet you, we’re Margarita Shadow and we don’t hate it.)
Simply put, this just isn’t a show that takes itself seriously.
“The big part, I remember when we were first talking about the show, was like, these people are proficient as all get out in their jobs and hopeless in their personal lives, and I was like, that’s something fun to play,” Lauren Cohan said.
Foley says the show, which follows Foley as an emotional FBI agent just out of a breakup forced to work with Cohan, a cold CIA agent, was designed to harken back to shows like Remington Steele, Moonlighting, Hart to Hart, or Simon and Simon.
“We sort of designed it to be like that, and I also wanted to play a character that was not your standard action hero,” he says. “It’s so much more interesting to me to play a man who’s in touch with his feelings and emotions than sort of the straight-laced, buckled up guy you see all the time.”
“These are two people that are very different that are forced together through a work situation and that actually work very well together,” Cohan explains. “The synchronicity of us as a team is great. We totally push each other’s buttons and bring out the best and the worst in each other as characters, so it’s fun.”
And it is fun, for sure.
Whiskey Cavalier officially premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on ABC.