Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | News | August 29, 2025
Regina King — one of the greatest actresses, if not the greatest actress of her generation — appeared on this week’s episode of WTF with Marc Maron. For 20 or 30 minutes, she spoke about the death of her son, how she continues to process the grief, and how that pain was compounded by speculation from “entertainment journalists” (her words). I won’t attempt to cover that conversation here — it can’t be reduced to pull quotes. It should be heard in full, preferably on a long walk. Bring tissues. It’s heavy.
What I will write about, though, is what Regina King carried with her from arguably the best cop drama this side of Homicide: Life on the Street: Southland. The series ran five seasons — one on NBC, the rest on TNT — before it was unfairly ripped away from us, ending on a cliffhanger that still occasionally wakes me up at night. The cast was stacked: King, Michael Cudlitz, Shawn Hatosy, Ben McKenzie, C. Thomas Howell, Tom Everett Scott, and Lucy Liu. Shot with handheld cameras, it was a gritty, grounded beat cop drama. I almost want to call it the The Pitt of cop shows. (That I cared so much about the characters probably qualifies as a little insidious copaganda, but I’ll let that go.)
The lesson King took from Southland — one she’s carried through a career that’s included two of the greatest television series of all time, The Watchmen and The Leftovers — is this: she doesn’t bring scripts onto set. Because on Southland, scripts weren’t allowed on set. At all.
Executive producer Christopher Chulack made it a mandate. “No sides were allowed on set,” King told Maron. “And that was probably the best gift he could have given all of us on the show, who probably all still operate in the same way.”
“It’s almost like the script can be your … binky,” King explained. Without it, she said, the process was liberating. If she forgot a line, she improvised. At worst, she’d call out “Line” like actors used to do in old-school rehearsals. But the absence of scripts forced everyone to be fully present in the scene.
Not everyone thrived under those conditions. Guest actors, King recalled, often panicked when they heard about the rule. “They’d freak out. They’d get that mandate and they’re like, ‘Oh my god. You really enforce this?’”
But the discipline changed how she worked. Without scripts cluttering the set, there was a deeper respect for the material. “You’d see them lying on the ground, people walking on them, using them as coasters,” she said of other productions. “They treated them as just garbage. It forced us to really know it, ask questions, and have conversations before actually shooting the scene. And we’d have incredibly short days because all of the work was already done.”
In other words: we have Southland to thank not only for one of the most underappreciated cop shows of the century, but also for the method that helped deliver King an Oscar and four Emmys (though, outrageously, not even a nomination for The Leftovers, which remains a goddamn crime).
Now go listen Regina King talk about the passing of her son.
