Imagine your son is an attorney who recently graduated from Harvard Law School, and has just been named by the Department of Justice to lead a prominent investigation into a police shooting. Imagine that your son has also given a heralded speech on race relations while standing alongside the governor of North Carolina. Would you then chastise your son for choosing a career in law instead of playing baseball? For most people, the answer is clearly “no.”
But on FOX’s new limited series Shots Fired, that is exactly what the father of the protagonist does; he criticizes his son for giving up his chance to “play in the World Series,” even though heralded prospects that never made the MLB are legion (perhaps the only worse baseball dad I can think of is Henry Rowengartner’s stepfather in Rookie of the Year, who tries to engineer a “sale” of Henry to the Yankees). This scene encapsulates the problem with Shots Fired in a nutshell. It is an otherwise entertaining and often compelling show that gets bogged down in its main characters’ personal lives (this review will contain light spoilers through the first two episodes of the ten-part series, which premiered on March 22).
As the series opens, Joshua Beck (The Wire’s Tristan Wilds), a black police officer in North Carolina, shoots an unarmed white man at a traffic stop, which quickly snowballs into a national story. The Department of Justice is wary of the racial politics of the situation, and thus appoints a black special prosecutor, Preston Terry (Stephan James), to determine whether or not to prosecute Beck. Even though Preston is fresh out of Harvard Law, the Department of Justice gives him this important position because it feels that optically, only a black prosecutor can make the decision regarding whether or not to prosecute. Preston is assisted by Ashe Akino (Sanaa Lathan), a highly proficient investigator who is distracted by the potential loss of custody of her son. Preston and Ashe soon feel pressure from North Carolina governor Patricia Eamons (Helen Hunt) to quickly wrap up the investigation, but they soon realize that there was another shooting of an unarmed black man several weeks prior that has not received the same coverage. Preston and Ashe thus decide to expand their investigation, to the chagrin of the town’s Sheriff, Daniel Platt (Will Patton).
While Shots Fired’s main character is an attorney, there has not been much actual practice of law so far, with Preston acting more akin to a detective as he determines whether or not to prosecute. Nevertheless, that investigation is certainly compelling, as Preston and Ashe grapple with whether or not they are doing the right thing by participating in the possible prosecution of a black officer in a world in which many white officers have not been prosecuted for killing black men. Preston in particular struggles to decide whether or not to defy his bosses at the Department of Justice and expand the investigation to cover the killing of the unarmed black man.
The show is less effective when it delves into the personal lives of the characters. While I always appreciate attempts to provide characterization, Shots Fired’s frequent scenes regarding Ashe’s custody struggles are not particularly compelling; I always found myself wishing the show would return to the main narrative. And Preston’s storyline about his poor relationship with his older brother, a star running back for the Carolina Panthers, is even less interesting.
Preston is the less compelling of the two protagonists. He is first introduced to the audience via a video of him calling his shot as a college baseball player, a la Babe Ruth. The Department of Justice cites this cockiness as a reason why Preston is named special prosecutor, but Preston does not actually display that confident personality during the actual investigation. Instead, Preston is relatively wooden.
That is not a problem for Lathan, a very expressive actress. As a former officer, Ashe feels at home trading barbs with the officers she is investigating, though she does receive criticism that she is no longer in uniform. Ashe is much more lively than Preston, such as lightly hurting a witness in order to get information.
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I will likely check in on Shots Fired at some point later this season. I am really hoping that by then, there will have been guest appearances by Mark Appel, Jeremy Hermida, and Lastings Milledge, discussing the difficulty of actually becoming a baseball star.
Harry Graff is a litigation associate at a firm, but he spends days wishing that he was writing about film, television, literature, and pop culture instead of writing briefs. If there is a law-related movie, television show, book, or any other form of media that you would like Harry Graff to discuss, he can be reached at [email protected]. Be sure to follow Harry Graff on Twitter at @harrygraff19.