Lucifer season 6 will touch on the Black Lives Matter movement

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Even though the Netflix series Lucifer is a popular genre show, its narrative structure is that of a police procedural with supernatural elements. It would be easy for the series to not touch on real-life events due to the fantastical nature of the show, but producers are making it clear that Lucifer will touch on a very culturally relevant movement that has dominated the news cycle more frequently this summer.

Ildy Modrovich, one of the show's executive producers, shared the news with Entertainment Tonight recently, explaining that they're going to touch on the Black Lives Matter movement and is doing so to pivot on the narrative of police-centered shows.

When we got back to the [writers] room, we started looking at the fact that we're a cop show and in what ways have we contributed or not addressed the systemic issues of the police department and we decided we wanted to speak to it. So we're actually doing a story that speaks directly to it, and we're super excited about it.

Modrovich said that she's "nervous" about tackling the subject because she wants "to get it right." This is probably the case for most police procedural shows that have to look at their platform and what it should say about the systemic issues within the police department. Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which is a comedy series about cops, is even planning on touching on the subject matter and they even went as far as tossing early episodes that were written for the new season because they needed to reexamine their approach on certain matters moving forward. The episode for Lucifer will come in the show's sixth and final season, which the writers are currently preparing, as the fifth season debuts its first eight episodes on Netflix today. Joe Henderson, another executive on the show, added that there was a "responsibility" to address the movement.

"What we did want to do was speak to the cultural reckoning we're all going through and, I think, we'll be continuing to go through, and our place in it and our responsibility to say something and go at it through our characters' eyes from an emotional place and not a preachy place. To really look at the situation socially, emotionally and have it resonate on a deeper level than just words or rhetoric."

The pair of producers discussed how they're approaching the episode to make sure it's done responsibly and a lot of that has to do with having many voices in the room to make sure the story is told authentically.

"We have a lot of voices in the room. We're a pretty diverse room, so it's taken a lot longer than most episodes to break because we have talked about everything. There have been many tears shed. I can just say everybody's very passionate about it, so I think that's what we're doing to get it right. We'll probably fine-tune it forever and be working on it until we shoot it."

The producing pair also said that the performers are also very much a part of the conversation about the episode. They stated that normally they pitch them their stories and the mythology of it but for this particular episode, the actors really wanted to be involved to make sure the story was told right.

"You might have noticed that our cast has been tweeting about it quite a bit. It's very important to all of them too. D.B. [Woodside] was one of the people in particular that we really engaged with it — Lesley-Ann [Brandt], with Tom [Ellis]. Normally we pitch them their stories and a little bit of mythology, but this is a thing that almost all of them asked about, so we've listened to them and we've tried to make it as much of a conversation as possible and a listening exercise."

I know some might not be happy that they're tackling this subject matter but I commend them for incorporating something very prevalent in real life and showing through the supernatural lens of their show. Sometimes this less heavy-handed method actually gets the message across. I'm a huge fan of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer TV series and Joss Whedon, along with his fellow writers, often tackled serious topics but through the confines of its genre storytelling. They tackled potential school shootings when that became a hot-button topic in the late 90s and even touched on teen abuse, toxic relationships, drug use, and more.  They were able to present these issues without compromising their storytelling but you got the message at the end of the day. Nice to see a show like Lucifer doing the same.