Shots Fired

Shots Fired has melded commercial and artistic impulses to create a highly entertaining series about entrenched racism.

Ambitious and intelligent, but also a sprawl that can’t quite master all the big themes and ideas.

Shots Fired is admirably ambitious and impeccably cast, if occasionally hampered by some overly conventional narrative choices.

The political story lines are weaker and a lot of the exposition is ham-handed. As racial tensions build in the town halfway through the season, the story becomes grand in scale but teeters with some of its provocative twists. Still, this is a drama with a broad curiosity, one that hears every character out but doesn’t confuse empathy with excuse-making.

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.

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.

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.