

Cast of equalizer with queen latifah tv#
She's also a familiar face, having worked every corner of TV for decades, from sitcoms to talk shows to a Cover Girl spokesmodel contract.

She's tall and physically formidable, meaning nobody could rightly question how her McCall would be able to knock out an opponent. In the past she's trained in kickboxing and rides motorcycles both skills come into play during the pilot. Plus, Latifah herself is believable as an action star. That very reason lends McCall to a gender flip more easily than other fictional crusaders. Spies and former special ops agents of all different backgrounds actually exist in our world, however. Others have bulletproof suits and endless funding from secretive billionaires. The distinction is that those characters were originally conceived as Black women, much like Blackbird and Lightning in The CW's "Black Lightning." Also these characters along with Batwoman and Starfire are pure fantasy.
Cast of equalizer with queen latifah series#
Other series and films built around Black women superheroes like Regina King in "Watchmen" or Kiki Layne in "The Old Guard" have been embraced and celebrated by critics and the broader culture. Not long before that, Anna Diop drew frightening levels of harassment when DC cast her as Starfire, an orange-skinned alien, on "Titans." The series is heading into its third season and Diop is still a part of it plainly producers were not deterred. You may recall that ethno-purists within those fandoms lost it over Zendaya's casting as Mary Jane in 2017's "Spider-Man: Homecoming" and more recently, trolled Javicia Leslie when she was announced as the new "Batwoman." Her character Ryan Wilder took over the cape and cowl from Ruby Rose as of January Rose left the CW series at the end of the first season. The good news is that Latifah isn't stepping into the boots of a comic book superhero. Unfortunately ignorant reactions to such character revamps are also typical enough for us to at least brace ourselves for impact. For the record, at a recent virtual press conference hosted by the Television Critics Association, Latifah shared that she and the producers received Lindheim's blessing before he died a few weeks ago.

CBS is smart to add this title to its list of reboots for the name recognition alone, and savvy to make some noise by casting a woman in a role that under the network's previous regime certainly would have gone to a man. Only recently the super-heroism of Black women was celebrated far and wide, making a show like this a natural extension of the cultural zeitgeist.

The very fact that this is a possibility is a strange factor to contemplate in the direct wake of the presidential election and the subsequent inauguration of the first Black and Asian person, also a woman, to the vice presidency. Presumably more people will welcome the chance to watch a female "Equalizer" at least once than who will dismiss it out of hand, if past instance of bigoted outcries from pop culture fandom tell us anything. Bet on it, even though McCall has already been resurrected by Denzel Washington, Black man. although series co-creators Richard Lindheim and Michael Sloan were obviously influenced by the iconic spy when they dreamed up their original vigilante.īut if Bond fanatics flipped out at the news of Lashana Lynch assuming the 007 designation for the upcoming film "No Time to Die," history and knee-jerk habit tell us that some portion of the TV viewership will balk at seeing a Black woman in this role. The popularity of "The Equalizer" is modest compared to, say, James Bond . Latifah is stepping into an arena already traveled by other Black actors by playing a legacy role originally played by Edward Woodward. Only now, in 2021, the hero goes by Robyn McCall, not Robert, and is played by Queen Latifah instead of a steely Brit. It's still a simplistic action-heavy spectacle that isn't shy about showing its heroic protagonist use any means necessary to protect the downtrodden with nowhere else to turn. The story still follows the exploits of McCall, a former covert operative turned guardian angel for the poor and exploited. Strip down " The Equalizer" to its bones and the reboot debuting Sunday after the Super Bowl isn't very far removed from the original series, which aired between 19.
