After upending basic cable with the paranoid prestige sheen of Mr. Robot and upending streaming content with the half-hour anthology drama Homecoming, the multi-talented TV creator and filmmaker Sam Esmail has his sights set on a new frontier: Network TV crime procedurals. That's right: Esmail's next project, an ABC pilot called Acts of Crime, is in one of television's sturdiest, longest-running, and most formulaic (as a compliment!) genres. And Esmail couldn't be more excited to dive in.
Speaking with our own Steve Weintraub in an exclusive interview, Esmail didn't give up any of the case details of Acts of Crime ("I'm the one that's sort of being strict about not saying anything so I'm not gonna tell you anything about the show"), but did share what he loves about the genre, and what he wants to do with it:
"I love crime fiction, one of my favorite genres in novels and in film and TV. It's been one of the things on my checklist, my to-do list, in terms of wanting to jump in and doing my version of it. And the thing about good crime fiction is that it's very procedural. I mean, the enjoyment is the mystery and the new story every week [where] you can watch this puzzle and these characters try and solve this puzzle. For me, I feel like crime procedurals have been kind of, on the broadcast side, it's been sort of the two or three shows that have been around for 20 years that have been very successful that are still on. And then outside of that in the streaming universe, there's been these sort of limited series one-offs, or even continued anthology series like True Detective. But I just thought with my take on a crime procedural where I'm sort of more on the basic cable side, bringing that mentality, or the mentality of what those anthology or limited series have done, and then putting and applying it to a weekly procedural series like you would see on a broadcast. So that's sort of like the basic gist of it, but I'm not gonna get into it more than that."
Esmail also shared that, unlike many of the truncated season lengths we get in the television landscape these days, Acts of Crime will be a network-friendly "22 episodes, if it gets picked up." However, he did admit there is a level of daunt in this amount of content: "When I used to watch procedurals back in the day, even if you set it in a city, it's like how many exotic murders that have all these twists and turns can these detectives get in a year? And it always ends up feeling a little silly. I remember I would watch 24, I mean I loved 24, but the running joke with that is, 'How many crazy days is Jack Bauer gonna have?' So I do address that — again, I'm not gonna get into it, but I do address all that and sort of embrace that as a sort of complication/challenge within what we're gonna do in the show. I also, 'cause I specifically went to broadcast, I didn't actually take the project anywhere outside of the broadcast networks, because I wanted to embrace the commercial break aspect as well. I really think that there's an opportunity here to tell the story where the commercial breaks will work in my favor in terms of how I'm gonna tell the story every week."
Esmail also revealed this series could go on for many seasons. "I mean, we're following detectives, there's murder mysteries, so as long as we can keep that fresh, which I think you can. Crime fiction is one of those genres where it's pretty timeless, people get murdered all the time unfortunately, that's just the way of the world. And fans like me love watching those kind of mysteries. So yeah, I think it can go on, it would have legs, yeah." As an unabashed fan of crime fiction, procedural storytelling, and Esmail's particular visual language and narrative topics, I am here to say, "ABC, let this show run for one hundred years of Esmail wants it to."
If you missed what Esmail told us about the Battlestar Galactica reboot including their plans for an experimental release strategy, you can check it out here.