Another killing for Veena Sud, both familiar and new

The 10 episodes of “Seven Seconds” traverse the blast radius of the death of Brenton Butler, the teenager struck down, and his race changes everything.

Episodes shift among the perspectives of the complicit police; the investigators, led by the inexperienced African-American assistant district attorney (Clare-Hope Ashitey) with a drinking problem; and Brenton’s anguished parents (Regina King and Russell Hornsby).

“My interest as a writer has always been with the cost of a life,” Sud said. “How do families grieve? How do people move on in the aftermath of death?”

Sud tends to lean into the darkness naturally. Her first short story as a child was about a dead pony, told from the perspective of the pony. (The opening line: “I died yesterday.”)

Sud, sitting in a rooftop boardroom overlooking the downtown skyline here, laughed at the recollection. “I was such a dork,” she said.

The high-rise had been her home for several weeks as she shot a movie, and she was missing her family and her corgis back home in Los Angeles. Small and almost uncannily youthful, Sud could, at 50, pass for 30. She was at once warm and deeply serious; a gracious, smiley person with a macabre bent.

As a teenager growing up Cincinnati, Sud tried — for fun — to write a screenplay about a friendship between two prostitutes. So she called the police station, resulting in several ride-alongs with a vice cop, and meetings with a madam in a brothel.

Sud’s parents had no idea what their 16-year-old daughter was up to. Her father, a doctor, came to Ohio (via Toronto) from India and her mother, a nurse, was from the Philippines.

Sud describes herself as an odd kid, a brown face in a sea of Midwestern white, and an introvert. To avoid lunchroom trauma, Sud spent a lot of time alone in the library, reading and writing. At home, she voraciously consumed TV shows such as “MASH” and “Hill Street Blues.”

While at Columbia University, majoring in women’s studies and political science, Sud audited a film class. She was the only woman in the room and the first screening was Brian De Palma’s “Body Double.”

As she watched an abused woman murdered by a man with a giant drill, Sud’s film career aspirations evaporated. “Having women subjected to that extreme violence and obvious hate made me feel like I didn’t belong and I should try something else,” she said.

She spent a few years working in journalism and as a film distributor at Third World Newsreel, a media center that highlights the work of minorities. Inspired by the filmmakers she promoted (she name-checked Julie Dash and Ada Gay Griffin), Sud was determined to try film again.

Divorced and raising a young son (now 26), she became a film student at New York University, working in the equipment rental department to subsidize a partial scholarship. (She remarried in 2005.) A master class with Spike Lee was a turning point, the encouraging antithesis of the De Palma fiasco. “I remember thinking, ‘This is an example of what’s possible for someone like me.'”

There aren’t that many like her in film and TV. According to a study by Color of Change, a racial justice organization that consulted with the “Seven Seconds” creators on representation,80 percent of showrunners working in 2016-17 were male, and 90 percent were white. On “Seven Seconds,” Sud forced a correction: Her writers room is half women, with two white writers, two black, three Latino and one Asian-Pacific writer.

King (“The Leftovers,” “Southland”) was watching Sud with pride. “Young girls of color might not even know the idea of showrunner exists,” King said. “It’s such a powerful message to be able to say, Veena Sud is the boss.”

The arc of “Seven Seconds” will be familiar to anyone who followed the cases of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray and others. In death, the hungry news cycle transforms Brenton Butler from kid victim into gang banger, then he becomes a political pawn in a broken justice system.

Series like “Shots Fired” and “American Crime” (which also starred King) have plumbed the nuances of racially charged murders involving the police, but both were on network TV. Sud pictured “Seven Seconds” (developed with Fox 21) from the outset as a streaming show, unencumbered by format and profanity restrictions. “It’s novelistic,” she said. “As a writer, any sort of forced break for a commercial is deeply unsatisfying.”

Netflix had been a partner with AMC on the third season of “The Killing” and then its home when AMC canceled the series in 2012. Cindy Holland, vice president of original series at Netflix, said the streaming network was eager to keep Sud in the fold, citing both her storytelling and her efficiency as a producer.

And Holland wasn’t deterred by the show’s political spine or concerns that audiences may not want to spend a weekend bingeing a dramatic take on the divisive issues of race and police violence. “We don’t shy away,” she said. “We’re wanting to reflect the times in which we live, and we’d expect nothing less from Veena than a complicated, sometimes hard-to-tell story.”

Sud has always pushed for those sorts of stories, even during her first big TV writing job on the CBS police procedural “Cold Case.” Meredith Stiehm, that show’s creator, spotted her talent when she came across a short story by Sud while plowing through hundreds of writing samples. “Something about a drunk, suicidal female cop,” Stiehm said. “Horrible and dark but moving. That’s the kind of story Veena tells, but she’s never exploitative or gross just to be gross. It’s really deeply felt.”

She was so impressed with Sud’s writing, and her first-in, last-out work ethic, that she eventually gave her the show to run for two seasons. “She was always pitching pedophilia and baby killing stories, which weren’t exactly CBS’s brand but we got a few through,” Stiehm said.

Asked about the origins of this lifelong appetite for the grisly side, Sud is circumspect. “Well, this is kind of a lame answer, but both my parents lived through wars,” she said. Her father was jailed in India when he was a child, and during World War II, her mother and her family were taken prisoner by the Japanese in the Philippines. “My mom was tortured as a baby,” she said. “She had dreams all her life of running from soldiers. I grew up hearing horror stories. Maybe I heard too much.”

But the horror isn’t usually explicit in Sud’s stories. Instead she crafts pensive, inward-looking cop shows. “The Killing,” particularly, was watermarked by Sud’s languid pacing. But when the first season ended, and Rosie Larson’s killer wasn’t revealed, some viewers felt betrayed.

“I was surprised and saddened by it,” she said of the vituperative reaction, particularly on social media. “Saying ‘I’m not going to apologize for the choices I’ve made’ created such a furor over my uppityness, it was almost like I was being taught a lesson,” she said. “I don’t think male showrunners’ audiences are encouraged to ‘Take out the pitchforks!’ and chase them down.”

She has no regrets about how the season ended, and in fact, appears to be doubling down with “Seven Seconds,” an unabashedly controversial undertaking that will elicit no apology from Sud.

She described it as an anthology show and hopes it will continue for two more seasons with both returning and new characters. Like “The Wire,” each season will focus on a different systemic issue plaguing Jersey City.

While living there during film school, Sud often marveled at the Statue of Liberty’s posture, facing only the residents of New York. “The American dream was being extended to the immigrants of Europe but not to the black and brown citizens, many immigrants themselves, of this city, this country,” she said.

She knew that “Seven Seconds” would be about the gruesome death of a black boy in the shadow of the statue. Lady Liberty’s indifference would stand in for a greater one, the one that allowed the real Michael Brown to lie dying in the street for four hours in Ferguson, Missouri, or the fictional Brenton Butler to die in a blood-soaked ditch for 12 hours.

“I felt desperate to tell this story,” Sud said. “It’s about time to hear people of color and women telling stories that speak to our experience, or close to our experience. We know these stories. The truth of them is ours to tell.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Another killing for Veena Sud, both familiar and new

This image of the empty, bloodied ditch is revisited frequently in the new Netflix crime drama “Seven Seconds” (debuting Feb. 23), the first series from Veena Sud since “The Killing,” her polarizing adaptation of the Danish serial in which the murdered victim was a white teenage girl.

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