61st Street Seeks to Show a Chicago Community in All Its Breadth and Depth

June 2024 · 4 minute read

Where is ‘61st Street’ filmed? See how the creative crew behind AMC’s new thriller sought to painting its atmosphere authentically, now not generically.

Source: AMC

Bentley Green and Tosin Cole in '61st Street'

AMC says its new TV drama 61st Street “classes during the darkish middle of the notorious Chicago felony justice device as police and prosecutors examine a fatal drug bust that threatens to get to the bottom of the police division’s code of silence.” So it’s only fitting that 61st Street filmed the place it’s set, in the Windy City itself.

The sequence, which premieres this night, Sunday, April 10, follows a Black youngster named Moses (Doctor Who’s Tosin Cole) who will get arrested in a gang bust and becomes the “eye of the storm” as Chicago regulation enforcement seeks revenge for a murdered cop. Public defender Franklin Roberts (Lovecraft Country’s Courtney B. Vance) agrees to constitute Moses, realizing that the case “can upend all the Chicago judicial device, difficult the institutional racism and endemic corruption at its center.”

The show is filmed “solely” on Chicago’s South Side.

Source: AMC

Courtney B. Vance and Andrene Ward-Hammond in '61st Street'

61st Street writer and executive producer Peter Moffat advised Block Club Chicago that the show was once shot “solely at the South Side” of Chicago and employed locals from the areas to paintings at the series, which can air 16 episodes across two seasons.

“Although it’s a show about a deep drawback, which is the police, I think and hope that it’s also a show that presentations a community in all its breadth and intensity,” Moffat added. “It’s a show about community spirit, a show about Black excellence, a show about joy, and a show about concern and nervousness and confusion.”

The 61st Street writers also worked with the local journalism nonprofit Invisible Instate, the headquarters of that are if truth be told on 61st St. in Chicago.

Invisible Instate founder Jamie Kalven, a consultant on the show, mentioned that the writing group of workers sought after “to be truly attentive to the particularities of the South Side” as an alternative of simply writing “a generic city police procedural.”

It filmed scenes at Cinespace Chicago along different well-known TV presentations.

As Chicago Sun-Times critic Richard Roeper studies, 61st Street now not only filmed on location on the South Side but additionally in the within sight Cinespace Chicago Film Studios.

Cinespace Chicago — a production facility of 1.45 million sq. feet on the site of a former steel mill — lists 61st Street as one of the productions that shot on its soundstages ultimate yr. Others included the TV displays Chicago Fire, Chicago PD, Chicago Med, Power Book IV: Force, The Chi, Paper Girls, Night Sky, Southside, and The Big Leap.

In previous years, Cinespace hosted the TV presentations Fargo, Empire, Lovecraft Country, and Shameless, and the films Widows and Rampage, among different productions.

The collection “perfectly captures the sensation” of a real neighborhood, Richard Roeper said.

Posted by way of AMC on Saturday, March 12, 2022

Giving 61st Street three out of 4 stars, Roeper calls 61st Street “an expertly crafted manufacturing, with docudrama-style cinematography that completely captures the feeling we’re actually in a community populated via a wide selection of figures.”

Those figures, he adds, comprises “the parents who are doing their absolute best to elevate their kids to keep out of hassle and strive to achieve their doable, to the drug sellers and gangbangers lurking on a ways too many corners, to the cops whose automobiles raise the logo ‘We Serve and Protect,’ which may also be a professional promise or a mocking insult, depending at the personality and motives of the officers occupying the ones vehicles.”

61st Street premieres tonight, Sunday, April 10, at 10 p.m. ET on AMC, and will continue each and every Sunday. Episodes also are to be had one week early on AMC+ and ALLBLK.

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