When law professor Stephen Carter’s novel Emperor of Ocean Park was released over twenty years ago, the response was unprecedented. The story of a Black federal judge’s death and the mystery that ensues when his adult children delve into his past tackled racial themes and offered a portrayal of Black affluence typically unseen in literature. Several publishers had competed for the rights to the book, resulting in Carter receiving a remarkably large advance to the tune of over $4 million. As a debut novel written by a Black author, this marked a powerful shift in literature at the time.

Although the film rights were acquired by Warner Bros and John Wells Productions at the time, and draft scripts have been taken on by writers in the years since, the adapted series is just now seeing the light of day. Created for television by showrunner Sherman Payne (Shameless, Charm City Kings), Emperor of Ocean Park stars Forest Whitaker as Judge Oliver Garland and Grantham Coleman, Tiffany Mack and Henry Simmons as the judge’s children Talcott, Mariah and Addison, respectively. In creating the character-driven series, Payne was inspired by both the social commentary and element of mystery embodied by Carter’s novel. 

Tell me about Stephen Carter’s book and the journey to getting this series made. When and how did you become involved in the process, and what stood out about the story to you?

The book came out in 2002. It was a huge hit upon release and sparked a bidding war for the film rights even before it was made public. Those rights have existed with Warner Bros and John Wells Productions in some form or another since then.

In 2019, I was working on the show Shameless with John Wells, and as that season came to a wrap, they approached me and said, “Hey, we have an option on this book. We’ve had an option for quite some time. Do you think you might want to take a look at it and see if there’s anything you can do with it in terms of making it into a TV show? We think it’s right for the small screen.” Of course, I was excited to continue working with John, and anything he brought me, I was going to really examine and engage with fully.

Sherman Payne

I read the book and, like the audience back in 2002, I was really captivated by it. It is an interesting and – I mean this in the best possible way – challenging read. It is sophisticated and complex, and the things that jumped out about it for me in terms of an adaptation were, first, the depiction of black people. We often don’t get to see ourselves depicted in this community level of success and prestige and affluence.

But even more than that, it was the central mystery. I think the job of a screenwriter first and foremost is to entertain – keep butts in seats, keep the hands off the remote control. Keep people locked in. And I thought that this mystery had a really good chance to captivate audiences. It was replete with twists and turns, backstabbing, shadowy figures, intrigue, conspiracy… it had all the makings of a great suspense thriller, and I thought that could be the basis for a really entertaining story. So after I finished reading, I said I would like to work on it and we wrote a pilot, which was really well received. MGM+ raised their hand and here we are today.

There’s some very niche knowledge when it comes to the legal aspects of the series, and also in its repeated references to the game of chess. What was your familiarity with those topics going into this?

Very little! The writer isn’t that different from the actor, in the sense that we have to embody a whole bunch of worlds that we are not necessarily personally familiar with. Like I mentioned, I wrote on Shameless – I have never been a poor white person from the south side of Chicago, but somehow you figure out how to write those characters. Similarly, I’ve never been a federal judge or law professor…but there are elements of these characters that I can draw from my own life to depict them onscreen.

When it came to the chess references, we hired a consultant. We had somebody come in and talk to us specifically about how chess works, because all I know is the basic rules. I don’t know any theory or anything like that. We also spoke to lawyers in Martha’s Vineyard, and a black person who vacations there every summer. So we had resources to help us get the details.

But in screenwriting, I always feel like the details are much less important than the emotion and the characters. What really rings true to audiences is not whether you got the name of a case right… it’s if they can relate to these characters and feel that what the characters are going after is something that they can hold onto and follow.

Let’s discuss the characters in this series, starting with Oliver Garland. How would you describe him?

I think Oliver Garland is a really fascinating character. He has a lot of cognitive dissonance and a lot of internal conflict. He has a lot of duality. On one hand, he is a loving, proud father, a hard worker who has risen to the top of his field by the sheer will of wanting to do it in his intellect. On the other hand, he is a very angry, demanding person, and he has a very difficult personality. All of those things come together.

Oliver Garland (Forest Whitaker) Photo courtesy MGM+

It just so happened that everybody in our writers’ room was a Black American, and we talked a lot about Black fatherhood. We talked a lot about how, in sort of a microcosm, black fatherhood exists much in the same space. Oliver Garland is the extreme version of that. But again, that duality of loving with one hand and sternness with the other hand… compassion and strict dominance… that’s what we see a lot from Black fathers and we really wanted him to encapsulate that because I think it’s an interesting dynamic that does exist across all fatherhood.

What about the siblings Talcott, Addison and Mariah?

Tal, who is really the lead of our story, is a guy who’s really struggling with his sense of duty – his sense of “play by our rules,” and his sense of what he thinks he should do and what he thinks is right. As he goes on this journey in the wake of his father’s death to figure out what happened, he learns that he can be more of a risk taker and branch out on his own, be more of a man of action. But I think Tal is also confined by the stagnant nature of his life and hope that none of it is disturbed. Obviously, he gets really big disturbances and it forces him to figure out how he’s going to react to them. He is the most beautiful child, the child who his parents could count on when they were younger to do exactly what he was asked to do. Come home by curfew, clean his room when asked… that kind of child.

Mariah (Tiffany Mack) Photo courtesy of MGM+

Addison is the oldest. He’s a former athlete, playboy… very charismatic and very handsome. Addison describes himself very early on in the series as the rebel of the family. And I think that is very much true. He is the one who is trying his hardest to buck against what Daddy wanted for them. The Judge is a looming figure in all of these kids’ lives. But Addison is the one who is trying his hardest to do something different than what’s expected. He’s the one who’s politically furthest away from his father, and I think that’s very purposeful.

Mariah is a great character. She is extremely intelligent, very driven, and does not take no for an answer. She’s a former journalist who’s won a Pulitzer, but now she is a stay-at-home mom. While writing, I looked to my wife’s own life, when she left her job early on in the pandemic to be a full-time mom. It created a lot of conflict for her. She still wanted her career, but she also wanted to dedicate this time as a mom. We tried to put that kind of dynamic, which (and I won’t speak for women, but I think) is prevalent in a lot of women’s lives; this sort of struggle and push and pull between motherhood and career. We wanted to put that forefront in Mariah’s life, and I think what’s great about it – and what I hope comes through when people watch it – is that it’s that dynamic that motivates her to do certain things in regards to the mystery as well. So it’s not only something that she’s dealing with personally, but it’s also a way in which she’s approaching the central problem of the story.

What role does the city of Chicago play in the story?

I think the location is really important for this. I also think that this is a universal story that we could have very well set in other places. With that said, we got so much great stuff in Chicago and what settled on the city as the location for this was that it allowed us to craft very specific choices for these characters. Chicago is a very specific city and it breeds people who are born out of that culture and they carry that specificity with them. So whether it was little side conversations about the Chicago sports teams, or Tal working at the University of Chicago, the geography of the story and how it worked out was all very important.

But none of that trumped just the sheer beauty of it. Chicago is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen. The skyline… and there are so many locations that just feel so historic and important and like they’ve been there for a century, even if they technically haven’t. You see why so many great things have been set in Chicago. We had a lot of fun playing with the dynamic of our beautiful black cast being in these iconic locations that you don’t necessarily associate with what we’ve seen of a lot of Black Chicago. The way that our characters move, we’re seeing black people in places that we normally don’t see them and again, that dissonance is really interesting to me. A Black judge presiding in a federal courtroom, a Black tenured law professor in a wood paneled lecture hall, lecturing to a bunch of white kids. There’s really an interesting dynamic there, I think, and part of that is due to the setting of Chicago.