3 New Liberal-leaning Crime Shows Set in North Carolina…

Excerpt From: News & Observer. Written By: Brooke Cain.

Well, I guess we aren’t Mayberry anymore.

Three new TV shows premiere this month with strong North Carolina roots, but each show is about a serious crime.

On Sunday night, ABC debuts the third season of its anthology drama “American Crime,” which tells a different story each season. This year the show tackles the topics of illegal immigration and labor, sex trafficking and addiction. It stars Felicity Huffman, Benito Martinez and Timothy Hutton, and airs at 10 p.m. Sundays.

At 10 p.m. Tuesday, NBC will launch what it hopes will become a comedy anthology series, “Trial & Error.” The sitcom is a spoof of the French documentary “The Staircase,” which followed the Durham trial of Michael Peterson for the murder of his wife, Kathleen. Set in “the Carolinas,” it stars John Lithgow as Larry Henderson.

And on March 22, Fox is set to debut “Shots Fired,” a 10-hour series about a racially charged police shooting set and filmed in North Carolina (primarily around Gastonia and Salisbury, but also around Charlotte, Concord and Mooresville).

“Shots Fired” plays off the many recent police shootings in the news involving unarmed black men, though the show opens with a black police officer (Mack Wilds) in fictional Gate County (not Gates) shooting and killing an unarmed white college student from N.C. State University. The attention that shooting gets angers the African-American members of the small North Carolina town, because a previous shooting by police of a black teenager in the town was not investigated.

As far as the attached big star names, Helen Hunt plays the governor of North Carolina and Richard Dreyfuss plays the owner of a corporate prison system.

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