Crime show focuses on immigrants’ hard lives
CHARLOTTE, North Carolina — At the start of ABC’s new season of American Crime, which premières at 10 tonight, a group of Mexican men is shown clambering through a hole in a fence separating the United States from Mexico.
This tips off viewers that the third instalment of creator John Ridley’s dramatic anthology series is going places this spring that could strike some pretty raw nerves, particularly given the current political climate. But the group is not going to California, Arizona, New Mexico or Texas.
“Carolina del Norte,” replies Luis Salazar (played by actor Benito Martinez), without at first explaining why.
And then we’re off to Guilford County — home to Greensboro, North Carolina — where a collection of sober, even-handed stories unfold involving a struggling tomato farm, its conflicted owners, and the undocumented workers bound essentially by indentured servitude to keep it running; a furniture supply business trying to stave off competition from cheap Chinese manufacturers; and a social worker obsessed with rescuing victims of the sex trade.
Ridley and executive producer Michael J. McDonald were intrigued by the idea of setting Season 3 of American Crime in North Carolina for a variety of reasons.
“We really wanted to show the collision between an older, whiter population and the new arrival of the Hispanic population,” McDonald says. (Ridley won an Academy Award three years ago for his script for 12 Years a Slave.)
“What has been going on there, politically, it’s a real microcosm of America.
“There’s an internal struggle right now between the left and the right, and you’re seeing it obviously in your politics with your recent gubernatorial election, and the HB2 [the anti-LGBT bathroom bill]. ”
McDonald said he and Ridley were intrigued by the idea of actually filming in North Carolina. However, due to ABC parent company Disney’s objection to House Bill 2, he says “it wasn’t even an option for us — they were not allowing any filming in North Carolina.” (The state’s unattractive film incentives probably didn’t help, either.) So, shooting took place primarily in southern California, with secondunit work done in South Carolina.
But it’s the characters and the gripping performances that have earned this series a heap of critical praise, as the series tackled race relations, the class system, the criminal justice system and sexual assault.
Season 1 focused on a brutal attack on a suburban white couple, Season 2 the sexual assault of a high school student by members of the basketball team. All three seasons have featured many of the same actors—King, Felicity Huffman, Timothy Hutton, Elvis Nolasco, Lili Taylor, Richard Cabral, to name a few— but they play totally different characters in each instalment.
King has scored two Emmy wins, and four others have been nominated: Huffman (who in Season 3 plays a woman who married into the tomato farm business), Hutton (owner of the furniture supply business in Season 3), Taylor (Hutton’s character’s wife) and Cabral (a tomato farm crew chief).
This season could well belong to Benito Martinez, whose Luis is one of the men shown illegally scrambling through the border fence in the premiere. The character has a specific objective — to find his missing son — but in a broader sense, Luis’s presence serves to cast light on a complex American problem and complex types of crime.
“In my character’s journey, you the viewer will see how tough it is to be somebody who picks the tomatoes,” says Martinez, who co-starred in Season 1 and guest-starred in Season 2.
“And you’ll see that it’s a complicated web of a lot of different things that have immigrant workers coming here.
“The farm owners need the cheap labour. And yet, the immigrant workers are punished for coming here to fill the void that’s needed by the industry. It’s a circular thing that’s not very easily corrected. So you’ve got people on both sides of the issue who are not villains and they’re not heroes. It becomes more complicated to make a straightforward judgment.”