Lethal Weapon is a cultural touchstone. It helped to launch the modern buddy cop genre — so even if you haven’t seen it, you’ve seen one of its descendants.
The snappy dialogue, extreme action, and yes, friendship are alive and well in FOX’s new version, which stars Damon Wayans and Clayne Crawford as two Los Angeles police officers who battle drug dealers and murders while becoming best friends.
The series is set to air its first season finale this Wednesday, and ahead of its bow, Dante Brown, who plays Damon Wayans’ teenage son on the show, spoke with Blavity about what makes the new Lethal Weapon so captivating.
Photo: Issac Sterling
Playing Wayans’ son is “like playing a superhero … you’re playing history,” Brown said. The original series has brought in almost $1 billion in box office receipts, spawned four movies, shot writer Shane Black to stardom and created a legion of fans that includes Brown’s own father.
His dad, Brown said, “used to wake me up in the middle of the night … and we would eat pizza and watch the movies … that’s great bonding time, and a great experience to have with your dad.” Having grown up watching the film series with his father made working on the show “something really meaningful" to him.
Brown says the key to recreating the magic that so captivated audiences in the simpler time of 1987 is ensuring that the FOX show is “a throwback” while still being “more relevant, more new,” than a simple rehash. The main characters’ names are the same: Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh. In the show, what seems a routine murder investigation unfolds into a nefarious narcotics plot and the odd-couple one-liners are present in spades, but Fox’s Lethal Weapon isn’t a period piece: it exists in the now.
And Brown has a suggestion for making the show feel even closer to the zeitgeist than it currently does.
Lethal Weapon comes on FOX. And guess what else airs on the same network?
Mmmhmm … Empire.
“That would be super lit to be in a crossover with Empire,” Brown said, suggesting that his Lethal Weapon character, RJ, could become a rapper who signs to Empire Records and suddenly finds himself far away from his father’s world of law and order, embroiled in a seedy world of crime.
If Lee Daniels isn’t a Lethal Weapon fan, however, Brown still thinks that having RJ become “a struggling artist or a poet” could be a good direction for the show. Failing that, he could imagine the writers either increasing the intensity of the action by adding a kid sidekick to the Murtaugh/Riggs team by having his character “follow in his dad’s footsteps” to “become a police officer,” or playing up the legal angle by having RJ “shadow his mom as an attorney.”
We personally think it might be cool to have RJ learn law from his mom while training to be a police officer who then goes undercover at Empire, posing as a rapper to take the company down from the inside. (We’re @Blavity on Twitter, FOX, if you want to hear more.)
We'll have to wait a while to find out what happens on the newly green-lit season two, but for now, you can check Lethal Weapon one more time this season, on FOX, this Wednesday, March 15, at 8 p.m.
