For Life boss on the state of Aaron and Marie's relationship after the fall finale
Giovanni Rufino/ABC
Warning: This article contains spoilers from Wednesday's midseason finale of For Life on ABC.
Aaron and Marie took a major step back toward each other in the For Life midseason finale, but there's still work to be done.
After moving out of the house in last week's installment, Aaron (Nicholas Pinnock) found himself sleeping on the couch at his office for most of Wednesday's episode because he couldn't get over Marie (Joy Bryant) and Darius' (Brandon J. Dirden) relationship. Thankfully, Jamal (Dorian Missick) talked some sense into him. So at the end of the hour, Aaron dropped by the house and made it clear he wanted to work on their issues, and Marie responded by inviting him in to help decorate the Christmas tree.
Aaron also made some major progress on the professional front. He and Henry Roswell (Timothy Busfield) agreed to represent a young woman who was at risk of being deported because she jumped a subway turnstile. As the case unfolded, though, they discovered that this was part of a large issue: "collars for dollars," the practice of cops arresting someone for a small crime right before the end of their shift so they can make overtime filling out paperwork. This is exactly the kind of institutional problem that Roswell, who desperately wants to make amends for his past in office, has been looking to take on, whereas Aaron hasn't been quite as interested. However, by the end of the episode, Aaron is on the same page as Roswell and wants to use the case as a way to tackle a corrupt practice in the city.
Below, EW chats with showrunner and creator Hank Steinberg about Aaron and Marie's future, Aaron's development as a social justice crusader, and what's to come in the second half of the season.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: I know air dates are in flux due to the pandemic. Did you know this episode was going to serve as the midseason finale when you and the writers wrote it?
HANK STEINBERG: No, we did not. We had a good feeling that it would be a great halfway point for the season, but we did not know it was going to be the last episode before the holiday.
How do you feel about it functioning as one?
I think it works really well as a midseason cliffhanger. It's the midpoint of Aaron's arc for the season as he becomes more of a social crusader, and also it's the midseason of his arc in terms of what's happening in his family drama.
Where did the idea to tackle collars for dollars come from?
We've been wanting to address throughout this whole season institutional and systemic injustices. One of the things we talked about right off the bat were these lesser-known institutional problems that contribute in a substantive way to problems that maybe are not as inflammatory and headline-worthy as some other situations but actually damage a lot of people. And collars for dollars is one example. It's kind of petty, but at the same time it's gross and it's such a real problem, and you can see how institutions can get away with it, and yet it chips away at trust in the system. And when I say petty, it's petty from the police side but it's really impactful for the people that get arrested on these smaller crimes. They have to maybe do a couple days in jail, pay bail, or lose work. There's lots of problems around this, and what it represents is just another way that the system is and can be abused when there's no oversight. I think one of the things that's really been revealed is that no matter how many laws have been passed, initiatives have been put forward, if there's no oversight or implementing of the laws or programs, then it doesn't do any good.
Why did it make sense to make this the first case Roswell tackled with his reinstated law license?
Tim Busfield is so fantastic, and we just love is character so much. As someone who was part of the problem and is now trying to be part of the solution and redeem himself, we just thought it would be a beautiful confluence to have his first case be an institutional problem he was aware of for many years but did nothing about even though he had some power to do something, and now here he is trying to address it. In some ways, he's ahead of Aaron. Aaron is just trying to get his feet on the ground just out of prison — get his family, his life, his career together — and he's not yet thinking about taking on the world. But Henry cannot wait to just get out there and tackle huge issues. He feels like he's running out of time. Since he was part of the problem, he's very, very anxious to get his redemption. So it all kind of fits together as Henry's first case and the case that starts to put Aaron in the middle of really thinking about tackling bigger issues.
Giovanni Rufino/ABC
Does the episode's ending mean Aaron is home for good?
Without giving a spoiler, I would just say that the fact that he's shown up at the door, that he wants to work on the problem, and just because Marie has invited him in to decorate the tree, may or may not mean he's actually home for good. But it does mean that he's not running away from his problems.
What’s the next step for Aaron and Marie on this journey?
There's some conventional couples counseling and then there's some very unconventional forms of therapy and catharsis that have to do with the particular issues of 2020 and how those galvanize people into having new perspectives. All of those are coming, and it's our way of addressing the issues that came up in this extraordinary year.
When I spoke to Nicholas, he said he found Aaron and Marie's struggles emotionally challenging. Have you and the writers been finding the season emotionally draining too?
It's been incredibly draining for all of us. Life is difficult right now for everyone. I'm in a writers' room where several of the writers I've never met in person. I interviewed them on Zoom, I hired them on Zoom, and I've been working with them on Zoom. Already there's an estrangement and challenge to connecting and sharing. Then of course, we're writing about COVID, we’re living through COVID. We're writing about Black Lives Matter convulsions of the summer shortly after the country has been living through them. We're writing about a time in history when we're not really that far removed from it. And everybody has really strong feelings about it. It certainly makes it very intense, but I think everyone has brought a lot of emotion and their own experiences into it. Obviously, it's much harder for the writers of color in the room to have to share about their personal experiences. It's been very challenging, but I think, a rewarding place for everyone to put their energy into, especially when everyone is trapped at home.
What's the key to writing about this time — the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement — in way that's insightful and not exploitative?
The first thing we talked about was: We're a contemporary show. We have to in some way write about times. We cannot act like COVID and George Floyd did not happen, especially since our show is so directly to related to issues of social justice. It's related to characters who have been in prison, and we know the problems of COVID in prison. So we obviously had to confront all those things. Those are the things that are coming up right after the new year, in the original episodes that air in 2021.
You know, it's like whatever you do when you're doing normal storytelling. You try to be smart, to come at things from the side, to not hit your audience over the head with stuff, to avoid clichés, to create scenarios and situations that you feel like haven't bene done and redone. When you're dealing with stuff directly in the history, you try to be elegant about it. To the extent that we're dealing with the murder of George Floyd, for example, that's going to be a fact that exists in the world of the characters, but we're not going to show the video. We're not going to show people protesting even though we talk about people protesting. We're going to deal with it as things we know, things that the audience knows [since] they've been through it. We kind of try to come at it from the side and not use the raw footage from the time to rehash what everyone has seen and experienced and has to suffer from.
What are you most excited for the audience to see when the show comes back in 2021?I'm excited for the audience to come back and see us confront COVID and the explosion that happened this summer from BLM, and see Aaron and his family in the crucible of that and see how it affects Aaron. We always wanted to do that with the character — create a journey for him to be a social justice warrior — and then these things happened in real life. It seemed like clearly they go together. We're just trying to embrace that and do it in a smart way.
For Life returns Wednesday, Jan. 20, at 10 p.m. ET on ABC.
Related content:
