PARISH – Season 1 key art | ©2024 AMC

In the new series PARISH, premiering Sunday, March 31 on AMC and AMC+, Giancarlo Esposito (one of the show’s executive producers) stars as Gracian “Gray” Parish.

Gray has a loving wife, Ros (Paula Malcomson), and a rebellious teen daughter, Makayla (Arica Himmel). All of them, in their own ways, are mourning the loss of Gray and Ros’s son Maddox (Caleb Baumann), who was killed a year ago.

Owner of a financially-strapped New Orleans car service, Gray is trying to make ends meet. He serves as one of his own drivers. It’s not long before we learn that Gray used to be a different kind of driver, the sort that, say, bank robbers employ when they want to make a quick exit.

Gray thinks he’s left that life behind him, but he owes a favor to his old pal Colin (Skeet Ulrich), who took the fall for Gray and did a twenty-year prison stretch. Colin insists it will be an easy one-time job, but soon Gray finds himself in the middle of a turf war between local gangsters and a mob from Zimbabwe.

Eduardo Javier Canto and Ryan Maldonado are both executive producers and writers on PARISH. Both from Florida, they have been writing and producing partners for over ten years, with credits that include CODE BLACK, TELL ME A STORY, HUNTERS, and DEATH AND OTHER DETAILS.

When AMC has a day of presentations at the Langham Hotel in Pasadena for the Television Critics Association (TCA) winter press tour, Maldonado and Canto sit down to talk about PARISH.

Esposito was already involved with PARISH when Canto and Maldonado become involved. Maldonado explains, “G had been working on this project for I want to say about eight years. As is the nature of Hollywood, it had been set up somewhere, it fell through, and we were all fortunate to end up partnering with AMC, and A+E, who really believed in the vision of the show, and our chance to do something special with it.

“The cool thing with AMC is, AMC has been about as influential in shaping the golden age of television as any other network. You’ve got BREAKING BAD, you’ve got MAD MEN, you’ve got BETTER CALL SAUL, you’ve got one of my favorite shows, HALT AND CATCH FIRE, you’ve got WALKING DEAD. And they’re all different kinds of shows, right? With their own nuances and their own feeling.

“And when G [who already had a longstanding relationship with AMC due to BREAKING BAD and BETTER CALL SAUL] came to them and said, ‘Look, I want to do this show, and we’re going to do this in New Orleans, and it’s going to have a Black lead, and it’s going to have a lot of Black characters, and it’s not going to be a show you can easily pigeonhole as a diversity show, it’s a show for everyone. It’s a cool, tense crime thriller with a nuanced arc for its main character. It’s about grief and loss and race and trying to get by in America,’ I think a lot of places would have been afraid of that. And AMC said, ‘You know what? Let’s do it.’ For us, that was really exciting. That’s what we set out to do. And I think we accomplished it.”

As to how Maldonado and Canto joined PARISH, Maldonado relates, “They were looking for writers who they felt could capture the essence of the show. [And] it was a chance to get back to our crime writing roots. We were involved with the show since the first writers’ room, and we wrote an episode that [Esposito] was really excited about, and as time went on, the relationship between the three of us just grew and grew.”

Canto agrees. “The fact that Giancarlo was there at ground zero was a big incentive for us, because very rarely do you have a lead who’s bought in the way he is, and really had an idea of what the show could be and should be, and so, having him as a partner and writing for him was a dream, and a rare opportunity.

Also, Canto observes of Esposito, “The man’s a national treasure, and he’s the hardest-working man in show business.” He references Esposito’s passion for PARISH, which came through during an earlier Q&A panel for the series. “I got off the stage, and I turned to Ryan after the panel, and I said, ‘G just took everyone to church.’ Because he just has this really infectious personality, where he inspires you, he makes you want to get up to his level, and that was one of the great advantages to having him not just as the star of the show, but as an executive producer, who could serve as a talisman for the series.”

Maldonado concurs. “It was a great challenge for us in creating content for him, and writing scripts for him, to really make sure that there’s an opportunity in having him sort of be almost like a co-author.”

PARISH has been loosely adapted for AMC by Sunu Gonera from the 2014 British miniseries THE DRIVER, created by Daniel Brocklehurst & Jim Poyser, which is set in Manchester, England.

Maldonado points out some similarities and differences. “Colm Meaney played the Horse [the gangster character played in PARISH by Zackary Momoh], and he did a fine job, as Colm Meaney always does in everything. David Morrissey played Vincent, who was a taxi driver, whose relationship with his friend Colin, and his loyalty to his friend Colin, ends up getting him in over his head. That was something that we thought worked really, really well on the show, and that was one of the things that we wanted to preserve.”

Also, Maldonado adds, “Manchester is a big, working-class city, and we wanted to preserve that element as well, as the series was adapted. But then, asking ourselves, ‘Well, how do we take advantage of New Orleans, how do we make this show a little bit more relevant to where we are right now in America?’, we started embracing the idea of playing on immigration, and also how we could express the vibrancy of immigration in New Orleans and the Black community there. So, that’s how we started getting there.”

In THE DRIVER, the outsider gangsters were from Ireland. In making the newcomers in PARISH a group from Zimbabwe, Maldonado says, “I think what we wanted to present with this version is, they’re different from what we’re used to. If you look at it from the perspective of, say, Anton, Bradley Whitford’s character, who’s the face of Louisiana business who also happens to be running a criminal syndicate, he’s looking at the [new] guys as interlopers who come to his country, his city, and started planting their flag, and edging into his business, and that is a big source of the rivalry, and the conflict that Gray finds himself trapped between. So, to us, it was less about this group or that group, and more about how do we express that we’re afraid of things that are different than what we’re used to?”

Canto elaborates, “Our show’s approach to the adaptation wasn’t as straightforward as I think maybe other writers. For us, we wanted to do our own thing. We took the building blocks of the original, and because AMC said, ‘Just do you,’ were able to put it aside and not let the original dictate what we were going to do with this.”

In New Orleans, each city neighborhood is known as a parish. Is that tied into the main character’s name?

Yes, and not only that, Maldonado says. “We went through a few different names, and then in the end, it did feel that between the pun of New Orleans’s layout. and also with his faith, we thought that it presented the duality in the character that we were speaking of. He’s a man of faith, but he’s also a man of the city, and everything that comes with the divisions within the city.”

AMC makes its Anne Rice universe series INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE and THE MAYFAIR WITCHES in New Orleans. Was PARISH able to use any of those shows’ crew or locations?

“It’s funny,” Canto replies. “We did share studio space with them. The interior of the Parish house, the second floor, was next to the MAYFAIR WITCHES set. And if you look very closely, you’ll find that the church that Giancarlo attends in PARISH may or may not be the same one from INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, because it’s the nature of shooting in New Orleans. But no. New Orleans has such a thriving, vibrant film industry that you don’t end up using a lot of the same crew. But what we did have was the ability feel like we were part of a larger ecosystem from a network that was invested in telling stories, so much so that they were putting their money where their mouth was, and really making sure that all of their productions in New Orleans had what they needed.”

Maldonado singles out one of their producers for special thanks. “Todd Lewis is from New Orleans, and he comes from the world of features. He was just able to get us everything we needed.”

Canto adds, “Shout-out to Todd Lewis, who is one of the unsung heroes of the series.”

Maldonado sounds like he is still in awe. “He truly could make anything we needed happen. We would ask him, ‘Hey, could you do this?’ And he’d be like, ‘Yeah, I could totally do this. It reminds me of when I did [JASON] BOURNE. I smashed a hundred and fifty cars on Las Vegas Boulevard. I can handle this one, guys, we’re okay,’” he laughs.

What would Canto and Maldonado most like people to know about PARISH?

Canto says, “I personally would love for people to approach PARISH with the desire to watch a really cool, tense, taut crime thriller about a nuanced Everyman who finds himself in a terrible situation, and asking himself, ‘How far am I willing to go to protect my family and to survive this?’ And then, as they’re watching it, I would want them to be open to and actively looking for some of the other things that we’re talking about on the show. Because on the surface, it’s a really fun time. And then, beneath it, with a little bit more investigation, you can see that there’s a lot under the hood.”

Maldonado says, “I’ve noticed recently a lot of people multitask when they watch television, and not only am I proud of what we’ve made, I actually think we made something that demands for our audience to put the phone down, put the computer away, watch this, enjoy it, be invested. We’ve created some incredible characters. This character is going on an insane journey. And by the time you get to Episode 6, the last episode of the season, I think you’re going to be craving more.”

Related: Exclusive Interview: Skeet Ulrich on the new AMC action series PARISH

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Article: Exclusive Interview with PARISH executive producers and writers Javier Canto and Ryan Maldonado on Season 1 of the AMC crime drama

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