The first episode of rap mogul Irv Gotti’s new BET drama centers on the “race reversed” killing of a young white boy by black police officers and concludes with the lynching of a white man, played by actor Brody Jenner.
The first episode of Tales, a six-part hip-hop anthology series, premiered Tuesday with a “reverse” retelling of NWA’s controversial 1988 song “F**k Tha Police.”
According to a BET synopsis of the two-hour episode, F**k Tha Police “focuses on the controversial killing of a young white boy at the hands of two Black police officers and a district attorney’s struggle to convince the lone witness to testify in court.”
Explaining the concept of the controversial episode’s ending, with Jenner depicted hanging from a tree, Gotti wrote in an Instagram post that it “reminds us of the fact that our ancestors Hung from a Tree. So it goes with the whole Race Reversal Vibe of the episode.”
The inspiration for the episode, Gotti says, came from the 1996 drama A Time to Kill.
“What made me do the race reversal is the simple fact I love this movie called A Time To Kill with Sam Jackson where Matthew McConaughey plays this lawyer and at the end of the movie he depicts a girl, 12 year old girl, who gets beaten and brutally raped and beaten and then he says ‘Imagine she’s white,'” Gotti told NBC News.
“It also came behind the concept of ‘Hey, how would you like it if that was done to you?’ All these things we know doesn’t happen to white people,” he explained.
“Making it happen to white people, it makes you feel a little different,” the Murder Inc. Records boss continued. “It hits you differently and hopefully it hits everyone differently and then they will understand that most of what I’m portraying really has happened to black people. Hopefully it hits home and it starts the dialogue and people talking about all of these bad things.”
Gotti told TMZ he wants the brutal scenes in the series to horrify and shock audiences into seeing “how black people are living.”
F**K Tha Police stars Boris Kodjoe, Clifton Powell, and Tyrin Turner. Shot in Atlanta, future episodes will feature a rotating cast and cover storylines based on famous rap songs, including Jay-Z’ s “99 Problems.”
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson