'American Crime' ABC News, Plot Rumors, Start Time: New Series Tackles Race Issues
A new crime drama series "American Crime," will premiere on March 5 on the ABC Network. Its series creator is the highly publicized and award-winning screenwriter of the Oscar-winning film about slavery "12 Years a Slave," John Ridley.
In an interview with Variety, Ridley openly said that he hopes the new series, like his film, will "change the way we think about race today." He mentioned that he had asked himself whether a show like this existed on network television and his answer was "Very fundamentally, no." He is the show's executive producer and is said to have written five out of 11 episodes, and directed three including the pilot episode.
The series' storyline follows a gruesome murder of a white couple in Modesto, California. The suspects are all minorities and the story unfolds not from the usual point of view of law enforcement, but from the points of view of the victim's family, the suspects and their families, as well as the community. As it unfolds, issues about race, ethnicity, faith and religion are brought to fore. Variety calls it "provocative."
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Cast members of the series include Timothy Hutton, Felicity Huffman, Penelope Ann Miller, W. Earl Brown, Richard Cabral, Caitlin Gerard, Benito Martinez, Elvis Nolasco, and Johnny Ortiz. Regina King is cast a recurring character, a Muslim woman living in the community where the crime occurred.
It was ABC who approached Ridley, who was fresh from his Oscar win, to develop the series. Ridley was said he was "given free rein" by the network. The script was approved to pilot in January 2014 and was given the go signal by the network in May of the same year.
Entertainment Weekly reported that Ridley's goal in coming up with the series "was to start a dialogue rather than make a statement."
"When we are confronted with these things, do we change or do we stay the same? Can we become more than what we are?" he said.
