Justice for all: Lawyer defends young Black athlete in ‘61st Street’
Television can be a powerful medium, so much so that artists often use TV to prompt conversations about real-world injustices, and that is exactly what a new drama aspires to do.
When a promising, young Black athlete finds himself implicated in a drug deal gone wrong on Chicago’s South Side, a passionate public defender takes the case in “61st Street,” premiering Sunday, April 10, on AMC and AMC+. Tosin Cole (“Doctor Who”) takes the lead as Moses Johnson, a high school track star headed to college thanks to an athletic scholarship. His life is upended when he is targeted by police, who claim he is a cop-killing gang member due to his alleged involvement in a botched drug bust.
Enter Courtney B. Vance (“Lovecraft Country”) as Franklin Roberts, a public defender who sees the case as an opportunity to expose the institutional racism and corruption of the Chicago judicial system. Despite a recent cancer diagnosis, Roberts is determined to take the case and defend Moses, even if it’s the last thing he does.
While the story is fictional, the premise of “61st Street” is all too familiar in the wake of cases that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement, including the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. According to Deadline.com, series executive producer and writer J. David Shanks (“The Chi”) talked during this summer’s Television Critics Association press tour about the potential for the series to continue the conversation about systemic injustices and police brutality.
“We want to have a healthy discussion in a safe environment,” Shanks said at an August 2021 TCA panel. “Nothing changes if we don’t continue to talk about it.”
While the Black community is often underrepresented in writers rooms and behind the scenes, “61st Street” is an exception.
Having grown up on the South Side of Chicago, actor, writer and producer Shanks has firsthand knowledge of life in the area and has admitted that he used to run from the police himself. Shanks later became a Chicago police officer before getting into the entertainment business, all experiences that give him unique insight into the issues tackled in “61st Street.”