All American boss on Monday's Black Lives Matter-themed episode: "It's going to feel like I wrote it last week, and that breaks my heart"

Entertainment Weekly

Showrunner Nkechi Okoro Carroll originally pitched Monday's storyline about a police shooting and killing a young woman who was sleeping in her car in February 2020, three months before George Floyd was killed. "This was always a story line we were going to do," Carroll tells EW. "As a mom of two young Black boys, I have a lot of pain and anxiety around this topic, so I poured it all into the script, hoping and praying that with everything that happened last summer and with the election and with the very public social justice awakening that this country seemed to be having, it felt like, maybe naively so for me, it felt like there was a shift happening. My hope was that by the time we got to this story line that the thing I'd be battling the most is that it would feel outdated." She added: "I never in a million years thought that this episode would be airing days after another young Black teen was murdered at the hands of cops. I never imagined it would be airing right after the Derek Chauvin trial. I didn't think it would be airing right after Adam Toledo's murder. It's going to feel like I wrote it last week, and that breaks my heart because it means we haven't made the forward movement that I was hoping."