Things aren’t black and white in the trailer for Fox’s police-shooting drama Shots Fired
Back in 2015, Fox announced that it was tackling the epidemic of police shootings of unarmed citizens head-on, launching a new event series titled Shots Fired. Scheduled for March 22 of this year, the series seems as sadly relevant now as ever, even as it inverts the ugly norm of those headline-making deaths by having a black cop shoot a white teen. Going off of its latest trailer, though, the show won’t take long to muddy the waters, adding a dead black child and his grieving mother into the complicated mix, as young prosecutor Stephan James (Race and Selma) tries to see justice done without getting himself killed.
It’s a heady, intriguing premise, even if some of the story beats being teased aren’t terribly subtle—most notably, the town’s white sheriff lobbing obvious threats at Sanaa Lathan’s private investigator (and her little daughter, too). Still, the cast is top-notch, with Richard Dreyfuss and Helen Hunt joining James and Lathan for what will hopefully be a thoughtfully uncomfortable viewing experience about race in the United States.