Raamla Mohamed Hunter had a two-name brief for the woman at the center of Reasonable Doubt: Michelle Obama meets Megan Thee Stallion. Television had never put those two in one person. She wrote the character anyway, and she is four seasons into running the show that carries her.
Hunter created the Hulu legal drama, writes it, and runs it. Its lead is the Los Angeles defense attorney Jax Stewart, who in the fourth season survives a kidnapping and a near-fatal shooting that leaves her in a coma. New episodes stream every Tuesday on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+.
“I think what’s exciting is when you have the gift of being able to get to four seasons of a show,” Hunter said. She compared the work of filming a script to dating, and said the scripts are only the start. “We write the scripts, but that’s just the foundation,” she said. “Now, it’s time to build the house.”
The building goes down to the soundtrack. “I picked most of the songs on the show,” she said. “For me, music is emotional, nostalgic, and it connects us as humans.” A showrunner choosing her own music is not the usual division of labor on a network drama, and it is the clearest measure of how much of this one is hers.
She was deliberate about what she refused to write. “I knew I didn’t want her in the hospital bed the whole season,” she said of Jax. “But she’s not resting. She didn’t take the rest she was supposed to take.” Then she named the thing the choice is about. “I think there needs to be more conversation about what we’re pushing through,” she said.
Hunter trained as a writer’s assistant on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and has written on How to Get Away With Murder, Little Fires Everywhere and Scandal. She said that despite everything, Black people always rise to the top, and that we actually have more power to put things into our own hands.
