L.A. CRIMES

An original television pilot by Daniel Shafer

In 1988 Los Angeles, a cocksure, rule-breaking detective in a notoriously corrupt and overwhelmingly white Valley police division is forced to work with a brilliant Black forensic scientist after an experimental forensic unit is embedded in his station. As each new case pits street instinct against emerging science, their uneasy partnership challenges the division’s entrenched racial hierarchy and threatens the methods, loyalties, and family legacy on which he has built his identity.

The first case begins with the apparent suicide of a woman who escaped the sex industry, the words “THE TAPE” scrawled in blood across her wall. When forensic evidence proves she was murdered and a second victim turns up, the detectives must identify and recover the mysterious VHS cassette before the killer strikes again. Their search leads through the San Fernando Valley’s booming pornography industry to a reformed pimp, his attorney wife, and her estranged father — the powerful “King of Porn” — all connected by a family secret at the heart of the crime.

This is a darkly comic period crime procedural dramatizing the collision between old-school policing and a new era of forensic science. Think THE SHIELD meets THE KNICK with the profane absurdity of FARGO.

Each case exposes the corrosive legacy of institutional prejudice, the uneasy divide between truth and justice, and the ways children inherit — and struggle to escape — the sins of their fathers. L.A. CRIMES ultimately asks whether people shaped by corrupt systems can change without surrendering the power and identity those systems gave them.

Shafer developed the pilot with 3 Arts Entertainment.