After their time in Pittsburgh, the producers involved in making "The Kill Point" said the biggest challenge wasn't making a TV show in unfamiliar territory, but the tight schedule required. The series premieres just 22 days after production wrapped.

Tim Iacofano (a producer/director on the Fox hit "24") has some experience with TV shows outside Hollywood: He was one of the first to produce American TV shows in Vancouver in the late 1980s.

"Back then we said they had 1 1/2 crews there. Now there are 30 different productions going on [simultaneously]," he said of Vancouver's bustling TV/film business. "Over time as the dollar changed and the province of British Columbia started making incentives for Hollywood to come up there, the work base grew and grew. That could happen here if the right incentives are in place."

A $75 million tax credit program for filmmakers, part of the state budget approved last week, could make Pittsburgh competitive with other states that have used tax credits as incentives to lure productions.

"Kill Point" director Steve Shill said films and TV shows made in Pittsburgh may help expand viewers' image of the city.

"I've done everything I can do to transcend the cliche, the whole idea of this dusty, industrial place," he said. "We all know steel and coal went abroad 20 years ago."

Only a portion of Shill's vision was visible to the public during filming here. While exterior scenes filmed in Market Square over a two-week period in May garnered the most attention locally, "Kill Point" began production in late March, using a Lawrenceville warehouse as a soundstage.

The interiors of Three Rivers Trust bank and Marcos' Espresso -- La Gondola in Market Square played the exterior, which police negotiator Horst (Donnie Wahlberg) takes over as a field headquarters for the duration of the bank siege -- were built at the Lawrenceville location, which also housed the production's offices.

Photos of Market Square were printed on huge backdrop curtains that hung outside the windows of the bank and diner sets. Red and blue flashing lights, to simulate a police car, were perched on poles outside the bank windows.

With Shill ("Rome," "The Tudors") as the lone director helming all eight hours -- unusual for any TV series, where directors generally come and go with each episode -- "Kill Point" was not produced in strict chronological order. The first half of the 66-day shoot concentrated on filming scenes in the first four hours, while the latter half of production prepared hours five through eight.

"The degree of difficulty is very high because of the large number of people involved, especially in the bank interior," Shill said on a break from filming in early May.

If a TV show features only three or four people in a scene, it has to be filmed from just three or four angles to get reaction shots from each character. But when a scene features 25 characters, 18 of them with speaking parts, that dramatically increases the number of camera set-ups and time for filming.

Difficulties aside, supervising producer Todd Harthan, who wrote or co-wrote many of the episodes, said if Spike TV renews "The Kill Point" for a second season, he'll be back in Pittsburgh again soon.

"If anybody ever asks me if they should shoot here, the only reason I'd say not to come here is because I don't want them to shoot the locations I want to use in season two or in a movie," he said. "I don't want Pittsburgh to get overexposed before I get to come back and do what I want to do."