A father receives a call in the middle of the night that his son is dead. Killed.
He wails with grief in a bathroom.
“They think it might be a Hispanic kid,” he tells his former wife.
She responds reflexively: “Some illegal?”
Then a teenager cries out to his father for help as he’s placed under arrest.
Those moments from a commercial for “American Crime” telegraph the impression that ABC wants to convey of its latest foray into the prestigious limited-series game. This is an intense and provocative show, punctuated with moments of raw emotion. It’s not too surprising that it’s the creation of John Ridley, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “12 Years a Slave.”
The 11-episode series is a trenchant, sorrowful exploration of race, faith, gender, class and addiction centered on a violent home invasion in Modesto, Calif. Taking the time slot previously filled by the labyrinthine “How to Get Away With Murder” and airing after the briskly plotted “Scandal,” it has a purposefully slow and deliberate pace, Mr. Ridley said recently in an interview at The New York Times.
“I think every week we do have this emotional resolution, but it’s not about having a real episodic closure,” he said. “Rather, it’s about building toward something over time” — a device generally left to, say, HBO or AMC or Netflix — “and that was new space for the network.”
At first reading, “American Crime” feels a bit like a neatly contrived package of archetypes: the deceased, an upstanding white war veteran; his beautiful wife, sexually assaulted and comatose; and four suspects — a hustler (Richard Cabral) mired in his many bad choices; a Mexican-American teenager (Johnny Ortiz) who may have unwittingly become an accomplice; and an interracial couple (Elvis Nolasco and Caitlin Gerard) addicted to drugs and one another — in custody. Case closed.
But soon those characterizations begin to blur, slowly turning what we thought we knew about the scenario, and those involved in it, on end.
“There was a beautiful emphasis on character and behavior,” Timothy Hutton said of his character, Russ Skokie, a recovering gambler haunted by years of mistakes who, after the death of his son, is forced into an uneasy reunion with his embittered ex-wife (Felicity Huffman). There wasn’t, he said, “this usual reliance on exposition, where you feel that you have to know everything about people in the next 10 minutes.”
Mr. Ridley, who directed three episodes of the show and wrote five, returns to TV, where he started in the early 1990s as a writer on “Martin” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” after a few years doing big screen work — as a co-writer of the screenplay for the Tuskegee Airmen movie “Red Tails,” directing Outkast’s André Benjamin as Jimi Hendrix in last year’s “Jimi: All Is by My Side,” and of course, winning the Academy Award for “12 Years a Slave.”
It was that film’s success at last year’s Oscars that, for many, brought this year’s nominations into relief. “I was just rewarded a year ago, so it comes off maybe a little disingenuous for me to be the one who rallies about change,” said Mr. Ridley, when asked about diversity (a word he dislikes for its “throwback” connotations) and the Academy. “At the same time, I think we in Hollywood can do a better job, I think we should do a better job, but I don’t think we should look at one year and decide how we’re doing on progress.”
Race, and the friction it can lead to, is one of the main themes of “American Crime.” And it’s in the character of Barb Hanlon, Russ’s former wife, that we see that discomfort come to a head in a way that feels downright shocking and even repugnant. As Barb, Ms. Huffman portrays perhaps the series’ most unlikable character: a mother seeking justice for her son. Her motives are understandable, but are undercut by her sometimes casual, sometimes direct bigotry.
Mr. Ridley was adamant about not creating what he called “straw people,” particularly in Barb’s case, “because I had an opportunity to write a white woman who may have viewpoints that are exceptionally different from mine, but they’re coming from a place that she believes is real,” he said.
He excelled, Ms. Huffman said, at shaping a nuanced survivor whose parched inner life and adversarial relationship to the world have given rise to prejudices that she explains away as pragmatism.
“We’re past the broad, sweeping generalizations of ‘those people are inferior, those people are this, those people are that,’ ” Ms. Huffman said. “Which is why people think, ‘Oh, aren’t we done with racism?’ And you go, ‘No, no, there’s a whole new face of racism.’ And I think that’s possibly Barb.”
Mr. Ridley knows he has created an ugly person on his show. And he hopes she does her job. “There may be people who believe what Barb believes,” he said. “And to a degree I want them to go, ‘O.K., good, you go, girl.’ But then they’re going to have to take that same journey that Barb is taking. And if they do, are they ready to come along for the ride and see all of the ramifications?”
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