A Jessica Alba Series Is Now One Of The Most Popular On Netflix
It’s hard to imagine a television series offered Jessica Alba the kind of money she makes with her time working at The Honest Company.
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Likely surprising everyone involved in the show up to this point, L.A.’s Finest is now #5 on Netflix’s list of their most popular shows. The series stars Jessica Alba and Gabrielle Union as drug enforcement agents for the Los Angeles Police Department. A spinoff of the Bad Boys movies, the series has aired multiple places over the past few years before recently premiering on Netflix. Despite its rocky history, L.A.’s Finest is a show Jessica Alba was excited to be a part of. In fact, it brought her back to acting after a long hiatus.
Even if you follow Jessica Alba on Instagram, you may not have heard of L.A.’s Finest. Alba rose to fame in the early 2000s on the TV series Dark Angel. She was in several movies, but then seemed to leave Hollywood around 2010. In the decade since, she has gotten married, had children, got a tattoo dedicated to her children, showed up in Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood music video, and started The Honest Company. Her company began in 2011 and by 2015 was valued at $1.7 billion. The company sells ethical home good products and it, not acting seems to have been her primary focus recently.
It’s hard to imagine a television series offered Jessica Alba the kind of money she makes with her time working at The Honest Company, but when your company is valued in the billions you can probably do what you want.
After taking on L.A.’s Finest, Jessica Alba was interviewed by Jimmy Fallon to promote the show. She said that producer Jerry Bruckheimer called her, and then Gabrielle Union called her, and while she hadn’t expected to be interested, they sent over a script that got her attention. “And you know, I’ve always wanted to be an action hero,” Jessica Alba said. “I wanted to be Bruce Willis in ‘Die Hard,’ I didn’t want to be the girl getting saved. I wanted to be the one doing the action and the comedy and all of that, and this is the first time I’ve ever read a (script with) two women of color starring in an action genre. It’s really cool.”
Jessica Alba’s show was originally meant to be a pilot for NBC, but didn’t get picked up. It moved over to Spectrum where it premiered May 13, 2019. The show was the network’s first original content. Producers Brandon Margolis and Brandon Sonnier, who worked on Bad Boys, were the show’s creators. The first season had a strong enough start for a renewal. However, that second season was supposed to premiere in June, 2020. At the time, the United States was experiencing massive protests against police brutality after the death of George Floyd. The police comedy was pushed back to a September 2020 premiere.
A month after the second season premiered the series was canceled. Interestingly, around this time, Fox began airing the first season of the show as part of its fall lineup. The network was impacted by the COVID-19 shutdowns and had gaps in their schedule. L.A.’s Finest, created for online streaming, has longer episodes where Gabrielle Union and Jessica Alba are free to swear as LAPD cops in drug enforcement likely due. Plus, this show was created by the guys responsible for the Bad Boys movies. In order to air on Fox, they had to edit the episodes.
Brandon Margolis said, “The biggest difference, if you were to hold the cuts up side by side, is that the Spectrum episodes will sort of feel like they’re a director’s cut of a movie where there is additional footage that didn’t make the official print, if you will. So the run times of the average Spectrum episode are anywhere between 45 minutes and 52 minutes versus Fox where we have to have it just under 43. So it really would feel like an extended experience with a couple of swear words thrown in for fun.” On Fox, the Jessica Alba series started off with strong numbers, though they did begin slipping over time.
One of the top YouTube comments on the trailer for L.A.’s Finest is from a year ago. It says the commenter hopes the show comes to Netflix soon. It took a long time, and a cancelation, but the series is now picking up steam on the streaming service. While Jessica Alba may be done working on the show, it seems to finally be finding an audience. It doesn’t sound like that means the show will be magically revived, however.
Currently, Jessica Alba is focused on promoting a new cleaning product for The Honest Company. During recent interviews about what 2021 has in store for her, she talks about developing products for The Conscious Cleaning line and gaining a fresh perspective as vaccinations move forward in the United States.
With Jessica Alba busy being an entrepreneur, will it be another decade until we see her on screen again? It sounds like that depends on whether someone calls her about a role she thinks sounds fun enough.
