An infamous Atlanta crime and an all-star cast headline the meticulously crafted and lavish drama Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist.
Inspired by the true-crime podcast of the same name, it centers on Muhammad Ali’s historic 1970 comeback match against Jerry Quarry and premieres on 50th anniversary of the event. The series features Kevin Hart, Samuel L. Jackson, Don Cheadle, Taraji P. Henson, and Terrence Howard as key players in a notoriously ill-fated heist that went down at a massive post-match bash hosted by a local hustler.
Parrish Lewis/Peacock
On the right side of the law, we have J.D. Hudson, played by Cheadle, who notes that his character was “one of the first police officers sworn into Atlanta P.D.” Back in the ’70s, he adds, “Black officers who could serve [but] couldn’t arrest white people, they could only arrest Black people.”
Describing Hudson as “a good guy, a decent guy who really believed in right and wrong,” Cheadle’s morally centered character — who is assigned to provide security for less-than-grateful Ali (Dexter Darden) finds himself making “a strange allegiance with [someone] affiliated with these bad guys, and together they sort of bust the group responsible and upend the crime.”
Eli Joshua Adé/Peacock
On the shadier side of things, there’s a stacked deck of real-life underworld denizens, including Hart’s Gordon “Chicken Man” Williams, a relatively small-time Atlanta street hustler, and his smarter-than-anyone-imagines sidekick Vivian (Henson, owning every scene as usual).
Capitalizing on the attention their city was going to attract after Atlanta agreed to host Ali’s return to the ring three years after being stripped of his heavyweight title for conscientiously objecting to the Vietnam War, Chicken and Vivian hatch a plan to throw a banger of a house party for all of the gangster visiting from out of town. Chief among them: New York’s “Black Godfather,” Frank Moten, played with a borderline homicidal intensity by Jackson.
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Ironically, the actor was attending Atlanta’s Moorehouse College at the time of the party, which attained urban-legend status after a crew of masked men stormed Chicken’s house to rob the well-connected guest list: “Yeah, I was around,” he recalls. “I knew some people who got robbed… and the actual robbery took place a block and a half from where my wife grew up in Collier Heights.”
“It was a big deal,” Jackson continues. “It was the first time we had heard about people being in the house, and they took everybody in the basement. They weren’t in their underwear [like in the show], they were stripped naked. So when the police came and the gunfight started in the street, there were naked people in the streets running.”
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Atlanta-born Shaye Ogbonna, who wrote the series and serves as co-showrunner with Jason Horwitch, filmed it in and around the city, including a brand-new soundstage facility opened in neighboring Doraville, to soak up as much authenticity as possible. That effort is evident in everything from the staggering amount of attention that went into recreating the legendary Hyatt Regency hotel’s atrium and spinning Polaris bar to the spot-on period wardrobe and production design. Chicken Man’s house, a nearly to-scale reproduction inside the soundstage, feels like that house you knew in the 1970s, with the linoleum floor, macrame wall art, and flocked wallpaper.
Parrish Lewis/Peacock
“The set dressing is great, incredible,” raves Cheadle while sitting with Henson in the unfinished basement set of Chicken’s house in between scenes. “The artistic direction is really great, and… the costumes, all of this helps build out our character and what it is that we’re doing. It’s easier when you feel like you’re really in those environments that you grew up seeing.”Parrish Lewis/Peacock
It also helps, according to Henson, to be working with the best. “[Don] was definitely the icing on the cake, I will say that,” she admits when asked what attracted her to the gig. “I mean, it’s Sam Jackson, who I’ve never worked with before. Kevin Hart, we have history. [Exec producer] Will Packer, there’s a history. So it was literally them calling going, ‘Hey, you want a job?’ And then Kevin was like, ‘It’s me, you, and Sam.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, I can dig it. I like that.’ And then, of course, I got the script and finding out that it was a true story and going down that rabbit hole, it just was like a no-brainer for me.”
Peacock
For those who have so far avoided Googling the case, we’ll hold off on revealing any more about the heist and how it all shakes out, but suffice it to say there is very little honor among thieves. There is a fabulously executed and sharply scripted story because of them, though, and Fight Night is a technical knockout.
Cinematic in scale, brimming with electrifying performances, unapologetically Black, and as funny as it is nerve-fraying at points, the series somehow manages to tell a crackling crime story parallel to the tale of Atlanta’s rise to cultural prominence. Ogbonna likens the piece to iconic classics such as Uptown Saturday Night and Coming to America, admitting that he’s proud to be telling a universal story of “people who are normally marginalized” from the Black perspective: “Everybody in this [show], this world, is aspirational. Everybody’s trying to level up… and for me, that is the embodiment of America.”
Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist, now streaming on Peacock
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