Richard Dreyfuss as Arlen Cox. Photo: Fred Norris/FOX
Richard Dreyfuss as Arlen Cox. Photo: Fred Norris/FOX
Creating topical television is risky. Creating a show about racial tension, police shootings and Black Lives Matter in 2017, in which the shoe gets put on the other foot is bold, to say the least.
But Shots Fired did it anyway.
The new Fox show coming to SoHo later this month follows a small-town North Carolina community as it deals with the aftermath of a police shooting - only this time, the cop is black and the victim white.
The incident also happens to eclipse entirely news of the shooting of a young black man just days earlier.
Hollywood stalwart and Oscar-winner Richard Dreyfuss recalls saying during filming: "Not only is it current, it's like watching the next day's newspaper headlines. And it was, it was happening in towns all over the country."
That's very much why the Jaws star joined the project.
He plays businessman Arlen Cox, a political donor aiming to build a federal prison in a show that acknowledges the grey area between heroes and villains, and black, white and blue.
"For me, the most interesting character in this show is a man who is a black man on a southern white police force," says Dreyfuss.
"And he's a family man ... and he's being torn in two or three completely different directions and it's fascinating. It's something deeper and it's worthwhile."
Dreyfuss says critical reviews of the show have been wont to use words like "remarkable" to describe the story - "and it is, it's something that's totally unexpected".
"It's not procedural, you don't just find out what happens, you find out to whom, and who does it and why and they're not just heroes or villains. I thought the show was easily cut from a different kind of cloth - it was a much more humanising examination of this creature in our society."
That "creature" being racial tension, which Dreyfuss admits is an ongoing problem for everyone in America - including him.
He says America never really "attempted to salvage" the relationship between black and white, despite any events of the past and present, so the tension has continued to grow.
Richard Dreyfuss plays Arlen Cox in the TV show Shots Fired. Photo: Fred Norris/FOX
"And it's something that people don't want to admit to, but I will tell you, even if Fox [Studios] objects to this: when a white man or woman sees a black man or woman, they go through - in an instantaneous nanosecond - guilt, anger, fear, hatred and action," says Dreyfuss.
"And that's something I would say is true everywhere in America ... and it's a shameful thing."
So it's his hope that Shots Fired will at least go some way towards changing how people see one another, and changing that process people go through when they see someone of a different colour - "a process that [can end] up in shooting one another ... that could've been dealt with 150 years ago, and we blew that opportunity".
"One of the reasons for our Civil War is that southerners never travelled so they didn't know the world was any different from what they had ... so that's what television does.
"It's not art's mandate or responsibility to change the world, it just does. The more you expose people to different thinking, the more you can widen their brains. There's a kind of truth in the world ... and that's that what is clearly impossible on Monday becomes absolutely imperative by Friday - we change and hopefully television is an agent of that change."
