- Network: FOX
- Series Premiere Date: Mar 22, 2017
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Critic Reviews
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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.
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It feels, in every way, like a broadcast network TV show about the investigation of a police shooting.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Though the subject matter is powerfully provocative, the plotting is a bit too predictably black and white. [20 Mar - 2 Apr 2017, p.19]
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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.
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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.
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The intentions of those who made Shots Fired are stridently righteous and good but in attempting to see the whole picture of race and police accountability in America, they’ve seemingly forgotten two a cardinal rule of visual storytelling: less is more.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 9 out of 22
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Mixed: 3 out of 22
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Negative: 10 out of 22
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May 27, 2017