Shots Fired

It's a fine drama, and Fox should be applauded for commissioning and airing this project.

A worthy and excellent new series that works as both a television drama and an interlocking array of engagements with some of the most thorny issues of our time. Shots Fired resists easy villains and simple answers, even as it knits its many pointed questions into an accessible narrative that is laudably brisk and generally efficient.

The focus just widens as the story goes on, which works in the short term because it gives us more of intriguing characters like Aisha Hinds’ Pastor Janae--but it also has the potential to end up with too many disparate storylines or just a tangled mess. Still, it’ll be worth sticking it out, because when it does manage to stay on course, Shots Fired is a pertinent and riveting drama.

Ambitious and intelligent, but also a sprawl that can’t quite master all the big themes and ideas.

More than halfway through, Shots Fired is still without any indictments while bobbing and weaving through various subplots. Still, it’s drama of a fairly high order.

Shots Fired tends to get preachy--watch for James’ speech in front of news TV cameras in the pilot that really sets the show in motion--but it sheds a bright light on what’s been playing across newspaper pages.

Fast-paced and trenchant, Shots Fired is a cynical snapshot of the American justice system in freefall.

Ham-fisted exposition and familiar melodrama abound, yet the excellent cast carries a story that slowly deepens, escalates, and truly explodes at midseason. [17/24 Mar 2017, p.90]

The strength of Shots Fired is in its willingness to pause the often dizzying pace of Preston and Terry’s investigation to let the more emotional human moments simmer. ... We only wish that naturalism was as evident in the writing, which, as the episodes unfold, introduces an unwieldy number of characters, witnesses, conspiracies, theories, and cover-ups.

Shots Fired is admirably ambitious and impeccably cast, if occasionally hampered by some overly conventional narrative choices.

The cast is great, the production values are high, the mysteries at its core are interesting, the social messages it’s playing with are important. If one wishes the overall picture was a little better, it’s only because of how much of this actually works.

Shots Fired is thoughtful and ambitious, but dutiful in a way that renders its social commentary less compelling than, say, that of “American Crime.”

The political story lines are weaker and a lot of the exposition is ham-handed. As racial tensions build in the town halfway through the season, the story becomes grand in scale but teeters with some of its provocative twists. Still, this is a drama with a broad curiosity, one that hears every character out but doesn’t confuse empathy with excuse-making.

The personal and the policy stuff don't always mesh perfectly, but if adding soap gets a few more people to open their minds, it will be worth it.

Shots Fired may lack the precision of its auteur-driven predecessors, but it’s taking its own path to starting a similar, vital discussion. That distinction alone is worth admiring.

[Powerful] moments are diminished by the mechanics of the plot, and by a few too many performances that seem to have wandered over from In the Heat of the Night. In the end, you can't help feeling that what you're really watching is a good, small movie idea that got buried under the avalanche of a major TV project.

It’s heavy and heavy-handed, overpowering and overblown, but it’s still demanding television, in ways both good and bad. But it’s a telling, open-minded and deeply open-hearted program that needs to air on television in 2017, particularly in audience-friendly broadcast stations.

It feels, in every way, like a broadcast network TV show about the investigation of a police shooting.

James and Lathan are appealing--you could build a decent episodic series around his by-the-book rookie and her hard-as-nails veteran quite easily--and while Shots Fired lumbers as an issue drama, it’s diverting enough as a cop show.

Shots Fired plays too much as predictable plot delivery system that sometimes steamrolls over its bigger ideas. Still, in its passion and in several performances, there is much to admire here.

Shots Fired’s biggest sin is its lack of urgency. For a story this topical, Shots seems constructed like a LEGO model--one scene is pressed onto another.

It does get better after the bloviating pilot, but if it wants to be on the same level as ABC’s “American Crime,” it needs better writing to match the quality of the performances.

Though the subject matter is powerfully provocative, the plotting is a bit too predictably black and white. [20 Mar - 2 Apr 2017, p.19]

Shots Fired drags as the story progresses, and the detours into its main characters’ personal lives are mostly distracting. The result is an uneven but sporadically engaging drama that tries to titillate its audience while also making it think.

While Shots Fired features a strong cast that includes Sanaa Lathan, Helen Hunt and Stephen Moyer, and name-checks real-life events like the police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, the program winds up mostly feeling like a tepid impersonation of a quality show.