Lucifer‘s fifth season hasn’t yet debuted — the first half will hit Netflix on Friday, August 21st — but fans of the beloved series are already getting a bit of insight into the show’s sixth season. Series executive producers Ildy Modrovich and Joe Henderson revealed that Lucifer will address the Black Lives Matter movement in an episode of the show’s final season.
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Modrovich told ET that, as a police show, they wanted to address the movement and systemic issues of the police department.
“When we got back to the [writers] room, we started looking at the fact that we’re a cop show and in what ways we have contributed or not addressed the systemic issues of the police department,” Modrovich said. “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.”
Henderson also explained that they felt it was their responsibility to address the issues of racial injustice.
“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,” he explained.
Modrovich further explained that the episode will approach the situation “socially, emotionally and have it resonate on a deeper level than just words or rhetoric” and that the episode has taken a longer than normal to break because of the care with which it is being handled.
“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,” Modrovich said. “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.”
Addressing Black Lives Matter is something that Henderson said is important for the series’ cast, too.
“It’s very important to all of them, too,” Henderson said. “D.B. [Woodside] was one of the people in particular that we really engaged with it, [as well as with] 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.”
While Lucifer will address the Black Lives Matter movement, don’t expect the series to take on other aspects of real-world 2020. Despite the Season 5 finale itself being disrupted by the coronavirus-induced lockdown, Modrovich and Henderson noted that Lucifer won’t address the COVID-19 pandemic at all.
“As far as the pandemic goes, nope,” Modrovich said. “No one wants to talk about COVID on Lucifer.”
Lucifer Season 5 debuts Friday, 21st on Netflix.