'American Crime' Cast on Why You Should Commit to the John Ridley Drama
If you’re trying to decide whether to pull the trigger and season-pass American Crime, perhaps you should consider the heavy metal that the trio at the forefront of the contemplative and heart-piercing drama about the aftermath of a murder on the families, suspects, and a community are packing.
It was created, produced, and often written and directed by John Ridley, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of 2014’s Oscar winner for Best Picture, 12 Years a Slave, and it is headlined by Oscar winner Timothy Hutton and Emmy and Golden Globe winner Felicity Huffman.
Hutton and Huffman, who had never met before this project, play an estranged divorced couple summoned to Modesto, Calif., after their war-veteran son is killed and his wife is assaulted and left comatose during a home invasion. As suspects emerge, so do family skeletons, racial tension, and evidence that the victims might not have been entirely innocent.
“It is a show about faith, the families of the victims and the suspects, a town that could be almost any city in the U.S., and a show about people finding something in themselves that they didn’t know was there,” Ridley says. “We aren’t going to have a dry dispensation of the facts. This is not about solving a case through DNA evidence or a surprise witness. This is about an event that galvanizes everyone around it. I want you to be with these people, walk with them, feel what they feel. Entertainment at its best is an empathy machine.”
Related: John Ridley, ‘American Crime’ Cast Talk Their Own Crime Fantasies
To accomplish those goals, Ridley felt TV was the perfect medium. “Listen, I love film, but to be able to return to these characters week after week and see that progression of what they are going through is exciting [because an investigation] isn’t a situation that resolves itself in days. Sometimes it takes months, years. It is also wonderful [that] the actors and the people around it start to bring things to it. You want to come into it with a game plan and a particular point of view, but when something starts to live and breathe in the television space, that becomes very exciting.”
American Crime premieres Thursday, March 5 at 10 p.m. on ABC.
