What’s better than one badass lady cop? Two badass lady cops.
Gabrielle Union and Jessica Alba are getting their own Bad Boys film spinoff series! The show, called L.A.’s Finest, has been picked up by Charter Communications as cable service Spectrum’s first original scripted series.
L.A.’s Finest stars Union reprising her character Syd Burnett (Will Smith’s lady friend and Martin Lawrence’s sister), who now works for the Los Angeles Police Department alongside Jessica Alba’s new character, Nancy McKenna. (Is it metaphorical at all that their names are Syd and Nancy?)
Both Union and Alba serve as executive producers on the show, and Union has been pushing for the show for quite a while. She told Entertainment Weekly that she was thinking about what Syd was up to now and called Bad Boys producer Jerry Bruckheimer. “Thankfully, she was so underdeveloped because it wasn’t really about her…There’s so much more to Syd than even I realized.”
Union celebrated the launch of L.A.’s Finest on Instagram. She said in the caption, “Cannot wait for you to watch @jessicaalba and I kick ass and take names! 13 episodes coming at ya in 2019!”
I am really happy that a show like this was finally picked up to series. First of all, it’s something of a rarity for two women to be the stars of any action project, although it does help that these are two very high-profile actresses. Secondly, both are women of color, which is also rare for lead characters. But the actresses have spent their careers trying to disrupt this norm, too—Gabrielle Union, for example, starred in this year’s Breaking In.
This show looks like it’s gonna bring some barriers (and some criminals) to justice.