This week Prime Video premiered their hotly anticipated new detective series CROSS and we’re completely hooked.
Source: Chris Frawley / Prime Video
GlobalGrind Sr. Content Director Janeé Bolden interviewed CROSS creator and showrunner Ben Watkins about building a more culturally rich landscape for the new series, finding inspiration in author James Patterson while crafting an entirely new storyline for Alex Cross and what he learned about serial killers while making the show.
“I had to learn alot — I’ve always been a crime junkie so some of this stuff just sort of like baked into me over time,” Watkins told GlobalGrind. “I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of books. My mother had me reading books and that was her favorite sort of genre, spies and crime and all that so I was reading that as a kid. I’d be reading all her old paperbacks and then you know I started watching movies and TV, so I had all of that.”
Source: Courtesy / Prime Video
Watkins told GlobalGrind the show’s villain largely resulted from research he did about the fandom who became obsessed with serial killers.
‘I’ve never actually done a serial killer and so I had to start going down this road when I decided I was going to do an original story for CROSS. I had to say, ‘Well who’s the villain?’ Because there’s a reputation to uphold. James Patterson [Alex Cross author] does great villains. I was watching a documentary about a famous serial killer named Night Stalker and in the documentary they were talking about the fandom that he had. Bags and bags of fan mail that he would get. That was my first question, ‘Who would be a fan? Who would write a fan letter to a serial killer?’ Then my next question was ‘What if there’s a super fan?’ And then my next question was, ‘How would they pay homage?’ I started asking questions and each question led to another question and eventually, it got very dark and it ended up with Ed Ramsey.”
Watkins also spoke about his vision of an Alex Cross who was grounded in the Black community and Black culture far beyond the way previous versions of the character have been in the past.
Source: Keri Anderson / Prime Video
“I have to say you know one of the things that Amazon has done with with this — and I told them when I took the project, I said, ‘There are a couple of things you got to know — in this version Alex Cross is going to be Black and there’s going to be some swagger,’” Watkins told GlobalGrind. “It’s a great combination because Alice Hodge really embodies this great combination of genius intellect that Alex Cross has, but also charisma and physicality and sexiness. So Amazon has really supported that and leaned into that and to them this show is a global tentpole, they think it’s got worldwide accessibility and they have really gotten behind it and marketed it with that in mind, but they haven’t tried to water it down. They have understood that the more specific it is the more universal.”
CROSS is streaming now on Prime Video
