ABC is offering an antidote for “Scandal” fans missing their weekly rush during the drama’s midseason hiatus — with another story of feisty female DC operatives pursuing the truth and taking names.
The eight-part miniseries “The Assets,” premiering Thursday at 10 p.m., tells the true story of CIA officers Sandy Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille as they track down notorious mole Aldrich Ames at the end of the Cold War — an apt subject to capitalize on the popularity of spy dramas playing out on the small screen and in the headlines.
“We thought that it was a mix of a lot of stuff that is in the zeitgeist right now that would make people interested in this series — ‘Argo,’ ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ ‘Homeland,’ ‘The Americans,’ [Edward] Snowden, Wikileaks,” executive producer Morgan Hertzan tells The Post. “There’s this huge fear and interest around secrecy and espionage and spying and the CIA.
“This is a true story. What we hope and we thought is if people are interested in ‘Homeland’ and they’re interested in ‘The Americans’ . . . to find out that there’s two real women that were breaking the glass ceiling and doing this stuff for real, that will help drive people to us.”
The bulk of “Assets” takes place in 1985 when Grimes, played by British actress Jodie Whittaker (“Broadchurch”) and Vertefeuille (Harriet Walter) are racing to save Soviet intelligence officers (“the assets”) from being caught and killed based on intel leaked by Ames (Paul Rhys).
It’s adapted from the 2012 book “Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed” by Grimes and Vertefeuille, who started at the CIA as typists and quickly rose through the ranks at a time when the agency was an Ivy League boys club.
“Their persistence is what caught Ames. They went to their bosses and said there is a problem here, there is something going on, you have to believe us,” Hertzan says.
“Even Ames himself said he was ‘glad these two broads are running the back room because they’ll never figure it out,’ ” adds executive producer Rudy Bednar.
Though Vertefeuille died last January (her obituary was what alerted producers of their story), Grimes was actively involved in the miniseries as a consultant, even joining the writer’s room in LA to help get the details of the story right.
“That was very important to us, adhering to the true story as we told it,” Hertzan says. “What we found in writing and creating this series, the harder we worked to hold to the truth, the more interesting it was.”
And though unlike other spy thrillers, viewers will know the identity of the mole from the first episode, producers are hoping the story will lure both those who lived through the Cold War and those too young to remember it.
“One of the things that we focused on doing was making sure that this was a compelling spy drama whether you knew the Ames story or not,” Hertzan says.
“We wanted to tell the story in a way that we explain who Ames is and you get to know him as a man, get to understand his motivation.”