By Jamie Ruby
Fox's new action-drama, Gang Related, follows Detective Ryan Lopez (Ramon Rodriguez) of LA's Gang Task Force, who before becoming a cop was part of the Latino Gang called Los Angelicos. He may be a cop, but he still holds loyalty to the gang and its leader Javier Acosta (Cliff Curtis).
Recently, creator, writer, and executive producer Chris Morgan (The Fast and the Furious franchise; 47 Ronin), executive producer Scott Rosenbaum (Chuck; The Shield), and executive producer and director of the pilot episode Allen Hughes (Broken City; The Book of Eli) sat down with the media to talk about the new series.
Morgan talked to SciFi Vision about where the idea for the series came from. "I saw a police video one time of a man – they were responding to a man with a gun call, and the police show up. It was a dash cam video and the guy with the gun actually has an AK-47 and he begins to engage the police, and additional police cars show up and they can't touch this guy. The reason why is, breaking down the video later, they realize this guy was a gang member and on top of it, he was sent into the military to become a better soldier to come back and fight on the streets.
"Seeing that just made me think, wow, if the gangs have become so sophisticated that they are actually now dividing and making a hierarchy and specializing in certain things, what else would they be into? That just started getting the ball rolling on well, what if there was a gang task force and the guy who's leading it is, unbeknown to the police, is actually a member of the gang working to inform for them? That's the genesis of where that came from."