Queen Latifah’s fired up in spin off
FOR THE first time in 25 years, the most coveted time slot in television will be rewarded with a new scripted television series: vigilante drama The Equalizer, starring Queen Latifah in a remake of the 1980s Tv-series-turned Denzel Washington film franchise.
The last scripted pilot to get the honour was Extreme, an ABC adventure drama, in 1995. Ever since, networks generally opt to go with special episodes or season premieres of an already-hit show; when it’s a series debut, executives usually choose a reality TV show.
But CBS has high hopes for
The Equalizer, in which Latifah plays Robyn Mccall, a former CIA operative who – as fans of the former show and movies know – seeks justice for people who can’t find it anywhere else.
“What Denzel did with the feature films has been incredible. If anything, he set a bar in a way but also gave us a lot of room to go a completely different direction,” Latifah said on a Zoom panel for the show during the Television Critics’ Association winter press tour last week.
She said Richard Lindheim, the co-creator of the original TV show who died in January, was very supportive of the remake.
The show was created specifically for Latifah, executive producer Debra Martin Chase said, and producers knew they wanted her character, who is also the mother to a teenage daughter, to carve out her own identity as the first female “equalizer”. (Washington, and Edward Woodward before him, played Robert Mccall.) Latifah is only the fourth black woman to headline an hour-long network drama, after Teresa Graves in Get Christie Love!, Kerry Washington in Scandal and Viola Davis in How to Get Away With Murder.
“Robyn Mccall was developed as a black woman ... we said, ‘No, we’re going to make her a black woman, not just a woman who happens to be black,” Chase said. “It’s been a lot of honesty that has gone into creating this show. And I hope it shows. I think it shows.”
During a discussion about fight choreography, Latifah said the show approached physical scenes in a very specific way, and not fighting just for fighting’s sake.
“I want to see Robyn fight not just with her hands, but with her brains. And to me, that's what you haven’t seen enough of, particularly from black women, on television and in a lead role,” she said. “We’ve been equalizing for centuries. We’ve been equalizing from Hatshepsut to Stacey Abrams to Kamala Harris. So it’s time you see Queen Latifah equalize on television in this way.”
In the premiere, Latifah’s character steps in early to rescue a young woman who witnessed a crime and can’t afford missing school or work to go into protective custody – and she’s all alone in the city, because her mother has been deported. (“Who do you go to if you can’t go to the cops?” the woman wonders.)
The producers said the show will explore many different communities, particularly people who are overlooked by the justice system.
“We have another story coming up later on in our season about a community that really has not been paid attention to by law enforcement,” said executive producer Terri Edda Miller.
“The Equalizer comes in and makes sure that attention is being paid to these people that need her help.”
For now, the producers hope that the idea of a vigilante appeals to audiences right now.
“We’ve been shooting outside, in cold weather and rainy weather and snowy weather, and working really hard, of course with Covid conditions, to keep everybody safe. And so, you know, to find out that we were airing after the Super Bowl ... I think it just gave us all a boost around here,” Latifah said. “It just made us want to go even harder.”