#Zandi equalizer show movie#
#Zandi equalizer show series#

The series also wants to make it clear that she’s not just a woman who happens to be Black she’s a Black woman, although race won’t necessarily be a recurring theme throughout the season.Ī scene late in the pilot, in which McCall tenderly but firmly tells her daughter that Black girls aren’t especially favored by society’s odds, also underscores what audiences should expect as a running theme throughout the series. A key difference between both versions of the series, that creators and showrunners, Andrew Marlowe and Terri Miller, are likely banking on to help it stand out, is that its center of gravity is Latifah, who becomes only the fifth Black woman in the history of television to lead an hour-long broadcast network drama - after Teresa Graves (“Get Christie Love!”), Kerry Washington (“Scandal”), Viola Davis (“Hot to Get Away With Murder”), and Simone Missick (“All Rise”). Her presence alone won’t be enough to distinguish the series from the rest of CBS’ assembly-line slate. Of course, as a fighter for the proletariat, she follows them out of protective curiosity, and is soon drawn into a conspiracy that involves deep-fake videos, a murdered attorney, mercenaries, complemented by the usual car/motorcycle chases, fight sequences (watch Latifah effortlessly dispatch four goons), trite one-liners, and the like.

It’s representative of the many series’ plot contrivances that McCall just happens to see the woman being ushered into some kind of storage facility at Coney Island, perhaps reluctantly, by a nondescript man, late one night. What prompts her to enter a new career of reformer is a chance entanglement with the case of a young woman - Jewel (Lorna Courtney) - framed for murder and on the run from the real killers, who are backed by an Elon Musk-esque tech executive. Like the male “Equalizer” characters, Latifah’s McCall is a former intelligence operative for the CIA who became disillusioned with the government’s methods and opted for civilian life.

#Zandi equalizer show movie#

There are a number of callbacks to the original series, which the reboot relies on primarily (not the Denzel Washington movie adaptations), but they probably won’t mean anything to new audiences. As yet another one of CBS’ exhumations of classic last-century crime/drama series (including “MacGyver,” “Magnum P.I.,” “Hawaii Five-0,” “S.W.A.T.,” and more), this “Equalizer” feels thoroughly unoriginal. She’s an enigmatic former CIA operative who uses her particular set of rather extensive skills to help those with nowhere else to turn. In CBS’ New York City-set re-imagining of the 1980s series “ The Equalizer,” starring the late Edward Woodward as the stoic menace with a populist message, multi-hyphenate Queen Latifah plays Robyn McCal.