‘Whodunnit?’ Premieres Tonight

CSI creator Anthony Zuiker’s new series Whodunnit? kicks off tonight at 9:00pm ET/PT on ABC. (More information and embedded videos after the jump!)

The murder mystery competition will span nine episodes, and it will feature 13 contestants trying to solve puzzling murders and identify the killer in their midst before they become victims themselves. “The show was like a thrill ride,” host Gildart Jackson (Butler Giles) told People. “In a perfect world, the audience will feel like they’re inside of a CSI episode. It’s like a television drama where a main character is killed off each week.”

Zuiker teamed up with reality TV producer Cris Abrego to create the series. “The way it really came up was that I had been developing the idea with ABC and in all these meetings we kept going over ideas and different approaches, but the one thing that kept coming up in the meeting was the term CSI,” Abrego told BWWTVWorld. “You know, CSI meets this or CSI this or we should look at CSI, and then finally somebody was like, ‘well, maybe we should call the creator of CSI and see if he has any interest in doing this.’ It was like a brilliant idea and such a simple idea and we reached out to Anthony, we set up a lunch and him and I sat down.”

“I love reality, the genre is fantastic,” Zuiker said. “I’m a big fan, it’s all I really watch. I’ve been trying to crack the space for so long and the irony is that all of my favorite shows are things that Cris has created, so when he brought me this concept and we got together to figure out what is the reality fiction version of Whodunnit? where you have great crime-solving scripted and you also have this excellent reality producing storytelling, we put our heads together and created this show.”

Zuiker and Abrego spoke to ABC Channel 7 about the series, and you can watch a series of short clips on their website. You can also check out two video interviews with Zuiker and Abrego below: