The cast and crew of Fox event series Shots Fired spoke to TV critics at the Television Critics Association winter press tour in Pasadena on Wednesday.

The 10-episode event series, a topical drama from Fox that explores the aftermath of two racially charged shootings, one involving a white teenage and one involving a black teenager, in a small Southern town.

Shots Fired‘s storyline starts with a white teenager being shot and killed by a black cop (Mack Wilds) who may be a racist, an edgy twist that some viewers may find odd and out of touch. However, series co-creator Gina Prince-Bythewood said the decision was intentional.

There was difficulty for the cast to play the roles, especially in light of current racially-charged events in the United States. In one emotional moment on the panel, Mack Wilds, spoke about the cast filming around the time of the murder of a black motorist in Minnesota named Philando Castile, and how there was crying on the set by the crew and makeup team, even he was emotional: “I could even stand to look it,” says Wild of his police uniform.

“All these characters are grey,” says Moyer who plays Lieutenant Eric Breeland in the series, “there’s no hero in this piece.”

Shots Fired ensemble cast includes Dreyfuss, Sanaa Lathan, Helen Hunt, Stephan James and Stephen Moyer.

The series is described by co-creator Reggie Bythewood as an “autopsy of a town like Ferguson” that features both “whodunnit and whydunnit elements.” The questions of who killed Joey Campbell and why Jesse Carr was killed will weave together a charged narrative that could not be more timely given the subject of police brutality and racially motivated violence in the United States.

At the panel, however, Lathan wanted to stress that the show wasn’t just all dark and heavily centered around violence. “There’s sexy-hot moments, there’s ‘oooh’ moments, there’s ‘damn, I wish I could binge watch this’ moments.”

Shots Fired premieres Wednesday, March 22 on Fox.

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