Race, Religion Meet In ABC’s New “American Crime” Drama

ABC’s “American Crime” stars Elvis Nolasco as Carter Nix and Regina King as Aliyah Shadeed. (Photo: Bob D’Amico, ABC)

A home-invasion murder shatters the lives of all involved in American Crime, an new ABC drama in which race, class and other differences create an uncomfortable melting pot of victims, suspects and confused and angry loved ones.

The series (Thursday, 10 p.m. ET/PT) kicks off with the killing of Iraq war veteran Matt Skokie and an assault on his wife, a crime more complicated than it appears on the surface.

Without the central tragedy, “These people probably would never cross paths,” says Timothy Hutton, who plays Matt’s struggling father, Russ. “They all have their own perceptions and assumptions, and they all need their own particular type of closure and understanding.”

Executive producer and Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave) hopes to take viewers inside a brutal crime, “where the stakes are absolutely the highest,” and see the people involved as real human beings, not the easy caricatures they can seem like from afar in headline-making stories.

The 11-episode drama, set in Modesto, Calif., is designed “to tell a story of where we are right now as people, how we look at each other and why it is we tend to galvanize around outsized events and take a rooting interest,” he says.

Factors such as race and religion give certain incidents “a cultural density” in the USA, he says, mentioning the Ferguson, Mo., police shooting of Michael Brown and the Florida shooting of Trayvon Martin as recent examples. “There are particular stories that we impose our perspective on that is particularly American.”

Crime, which features white victims and Latino and African-American suspects, has drawn attention for its broad range of characters. Their similarities, as exemplified by “universal themes of loss, pain, rage,” are significant, says Felicity Huffman (Desperate Housewives), who plays the murder victim’s mother, Barb Hanlon.

Characters who appear to be opposites, such as Barb, a brittle woman who immediately thinks of a Latino suspect as “some illegal,” and Aliyah Shadeed (Regina King), a Muslim woman who disapproves of her murder-suspect brother’s (Elvis Nolasco) involvement with a white woman (Caitlin Gerard), are both fighting on behalf of family members.

“Even when you think two people can’t be more different, they’re actually so much alike,” King says.

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SOURCE: USA Today
Bill Keveney