Jessica Alba & Gabrielle Union talk Bad Boy’s TV spin-off L.A.’s Finest

Although it's finally official that Will Smith and Martin Lawrence will return for BAD BOYS FOR LIFE, our next peek into the BAD BOYS universe will actually arrive on the small-screen with L.A.'s Finest, an upcoming series starring Gabrielle Union and Jessica Alba. As you know, Union played Syd Burnett in BAD BOYS II, an undercover DEA agent who also happened to by Marcus' (Lawrence) sister, and the actress told Entertainment Weekly that the series came to be when she began wondering what Syd would be up to in this day and age.

She’s such a badass character. But depending on how you look at it, fortunately or unfortunately, we have no idea what makes Syd, Syd. So we were sort of sitting around and joking, “So, what’s in Syd’s Netflix queue? Where is Syd? Did her and Mike (Will Smith) break up? Are they in couples counseling? I’m actually curious. So he saved her but she was kind of a badass chick to begin with, so what the hell happened to her? I want to find out."… I wanted another life for Syd. Let’s create a new mythology set apart from Miami but still connected and rooted in that Bad Boys tone and vibe, but see how she stands up on her own. And then let’s find a badass, boss woman to partner her with.

"The more we started to create the L.A.’s Finest mythology, it got more and more interesting and cooler and lighter in some areas and way darker in some areas," Union continued. "But what I loved is that we allowed for Syd to be much more complex than the chick in the bikini on the beach and the girl who had to be saved by her brother and her lover. We show Syd saving herself and these women saving each other and supporting each other, and also having natural conflict that doesn’t come from a stereotypical, very anti-feminist place. And we’re getting women of color paid! All of that appealed to me." You can check out a new photo from L.A.'s Finest below.

As she's spent the last handful of years building a business and raising a family, Jessica Alba hadn't been acting on a regular basis for some time, but when Gabrielle Union called about playing Nancy McKenna in L.A.'s Finest, Alba knew she couldn't refuse.

Ninety percent of why I decided to sign onto this show is Gabrielle Union. I’m not even gonna front, I trusted my gut. She rang me and I just got a good feeling about it. And I definitely was not even thinking of going to work that soon. I was going to take a full four months maternity after I had my son, but I just felt like it was an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. Especially collaborating with her and being able to be on set and learn from her. She’s a producer and she creates a lot of stuff and has been in this business for such a long time, and I just felt like it would be really cool to collaborate with her. And that’s really why I wanted to do this show. And then the cherry on top was the Jerry Bruckheimer brand. Those are the movies that I grew up on. This type of show is like my dream. Ten years ago, they weren’t making this show with female leads, they were making this show with men. Or it was written for men and they just changed it to women but it still felt very masculine. But this feels very feminine and our characters are complex.

Like most buddy cop duos, Gabrielle Union says that Syd and Nancy may not always agree with one another, but that "at the end of the day, I have your back in the most fierce, dope, complex, beautiful friendship that we’ve ever seen on television." Alba agreed, saying, "I think you really get to see a female friendship in that ride-or-die mentality play out in the best way. But like she said, we’re not always on the same page, but we agree to disagree and we keep it moving and we try to learn from our mistakes and admit our faults and that is something that is nice to see, because usually your heroes are flawless and they’re the victims of circumstance if anything goes wrong, and that’s just not the case here. You get to see real human beings that are just trying to figure it out, and I think it’s going to be really relatable, whether you’re a man or a woman watching the show." L.A.'s Finest is set to premiere next April on Spectrum.