Take “The Equalizer” to the bone and restart the premiere on Sunday after the Super Bowl is not far from the original series, which aired between 1985 and 1989. The story still follows the exploits of McCall, a former secret agent who became a guardian angel for the poor and exploited. It is still a simplistic and action-packed show that is not ashamed to show its heroic protagonist using all the necessary means to protect the oppressed with nowhere else to turn.
Only now, in 2021, the hero is Robyn McCall, not Robert, and is played by Queen Latifah instead of a steel Brit.
Latifah is entering an arena already covered by other black actors by playing a legacy role originally played by Edward Woodward. The popularity of “The Equalizer” is modest compared to, say, James Bond. . . although co-creators of the series Richard Lindheim and Michael Sloan were obviously influenced by the iconic spy when they dreamed of their original watchman.
But if Bond fanatics freaked out about the news of Lashana Lynch taking on the 007 designation for the next film “No Time to Die”, history and instinctive habit tell us that part of the TV audience will refuse to see a woman black this function. Bet on it, although McCall has already been resurrected by Denzel Washington, the Negro.
Presumably, more people will appreciate the chance to watch a female “Equalizer” at least once than who will drop it immediately, if the biased protests of the pop culture fandom tell us something. The very fact that this 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, also a woman, to the vice-presidency.
Only recently has black women’s superheroism been celebrated everywhere, making a show like this a natural extension of the cultural zeitgeist. CBS is smart in adding this title to its list of reboots just for name recognition, and able to make some noise when putting a woman in a role that under the previous regime of the network would certainly have passed on to a man. For the record, at a recent virtual press conference organized by the Television Critics Association, Latifah shared that she and the producers received Lindheim’s blessing before he died a few weeks ago.
Unfortunately, ignorant reactions to such character makeovers are also typical enough for us to at least prepare for impact.
The good news is that Latifah is not stepping on the boots of a comic book superhero. You should remember that Ethnopurists inside these fandoms freaked out Zendaya’s cast as Mary Jane in 2017’s “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and, more recently, trolled Javicia Leslie when she was announced as the new “Batwoman”. His character Ryan Wilder took over the cover and hood of Ruby Rose from January; Rose left the CW series at the end of the first season.
Not long before that, Anna Diop achieved frightening levels of harassment when DC cast her as Starfire, an orange-skinned alien, on “Titans”. The series is entering its third season and Diop is still part of it; clearly the producers were not deterred.
Other series and films built around black female superheroes, such as Regina King in “Watchmen” or Kiki Layne in “The Old Guard”, have been adopted and celebrated by critics and culture in general. The difference is that these characters were originally conceived as black women, as well as Blackbird and Lightning in CW’s “Black Lightning”. Furthermore, these characters along with Batwoman and Starfire are pure fantasy. Some can fly. Others have bulletproof suits and endless funds from secret billionaires.
However, spies and former special operations agents from different backgrounds do exist in our world. They walk among us. That same reason lends McCall to gender change more easily than other fictional crusaders.
Furthermore, Latifah herself is credible as an action star. In the past, she trained kickboxing and rides a motorcycle; both skills come into play during the pilot. She is also tall and physically formidable, which means that no one could properly question how her McCall would be able to knock out an opponent. She is also a familiar face, having worked in every corner of TV for decades, from sitcoms to talk shows to a Cover Girl spokesperson model contract. For the same reasons that Denzel Washington chose “The Equalizer” and ran away with it, it is not difficult to imagine the public buying it as the protagonist here.
Latifah’s lead role in “The Equalizer” highlights a rarity on open television that shouldn’t be today: she is only the fourth black woman in media history to lead an hour-long drama on NBC, CBS, ABC or Fox, following in the footsteps of “Get Christie Love!” star Teresa Graves, “Scandal” led Kerry Washington and Viola Davis on “How to Get Away with Murder”. (This list is growing and will soon include a planned series about Tony Stark’s protégé, Ironheart, featuring Dominique Thorn as Riri Williams.)
It is too early to predict whether the restart of “The Equalizer” will have the same longevity as the Washington and Davis programs. The original aired for four seasons, and the first episode of the revived version is a delight for standard CBS audiences. Other reboots that spanned several seasons had less exciting releases.
Complaints about any new series are inevitable, because few drivers are perfect and most are simply repairable. Hopefully, any problem that this new “Equalizer” raises is for reasons other than the star’s gender or its blackness, because none of these characteristics have anything to do with how effectively it can solve the problems of an ordinary person or overcome the odds against they.
“The Equalizer” premieres on Sunday, February 7 on CBS, immediately after the Super Bowl and after that it airs on Sundays at 8 pm.