How Emperor of Ocean Park Went From Bestselling Novel to Timely TV Show 

He notes it as an aside — one brief observation in the middle of a long interview.

But Forest Whitaker says, with some irony, that the role he’s now tackling in the MGM+ series Emperor of Ocean Park is a part he thought was filled years ago by another actor.

That’s when buzz was circulating that someone was making a film of the bestselling 2002 novel about the death of a Black conservative judge-turned-right-wing pundit, a controversial figure whose nomination to the Supreme Court had been undone by a scandalous association. Whitaker had heard Samuel L. Jackson might be in line to play Judge Oliver Garland, and another rumor had Denzel Washington in the running.

“I remember thinking, ‘God, I would like to play that part,’” Whitaker says. “Judge Garland is quite different than most characters I’ve played. That’s something that attracts me about a role; I know I’m going to grow from it and learn some things.”

More than two decades after the book was published, Whitaker finally gets his wish — leading a cast tapped to bring Stephen L. Carter’s popular novel to life in a 10-episode series. It’s a complex tale, blending the intrigue of bare-knuckle politics and a suspicion that the judge was murdered with a full-throated drama centered on the tensions within a privileged Black family.

“It was really interesting to me to explore a family used to Martha’s Vineyard and the Harvard line, successful Black men and families who holidayed in the Hamptons and had their own culture,” Whitaker says.

But it took a long time to bring this family to viewers. Producer John Wells, known for complex TV dramas like ER, The West Wing and Shameless, optioned the rights to Carter’s debut novel through his John Wells Productions more than 20 years ago, even before it was published. The Emperor of Ocean Park, which Carter wrote while teaching law at Yale, became a smash, spending 11 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and bringing a story set in the world of elite Black American families to a mainstream literary audience.

Wells says his company bought the film rights and planned to make it as a movie for Warner Bros. “We developed it on and off for about six or seven years, but we could never find the cast to put it together at a budget that Warner Bros. wanted to do.”

The idea sat in JWP’s archives until a recent look through their old projects prompted the notion that Emperor might make a great series. And though it seems a miracle that they’ve revived a story shelved so long ago, Wells shrugs off the many years it took to get a version of the novel made as a TV series.

“Shameless took seven years before it was made, ER was almost three and The West Wing was several years, so it’s not an unusual occurrence,” he adds. “I like to think that, when it finally does come together, it was just the right time.”

But, given the subject matter, a question arises: Could part of the delay have been because some people didn’t think TV was ready for a show about a Black family like the Garlands?

“Nobody ever said anything like that to me, that TV wasn’t ready, but you can draw your own conclusions by how long it took,” Wells says. “Certainly, time has helped make this much more palatable for those who had doubts. You know, it didn’t hurt that we had a Black president for two terms.”

Wealth, privilege, race and politics figure in the plot of Emperor of Ocean Park, which centers on the untimely death of Judge Oliver Garland, a brilliant conservative jurist who became an outspoken right-wing pundit after his nomination to the Supreme Court failed. The show tells Garland’s story in flashback, toggling between the efforts of his three grown children to come to terms with his passing — including a growing belief by daughter Mariah that the judge was somehow murdered — and moments in his past that tell the complicated story of his work as a judge, why his nomination failed and a dark family mystery that overshadows the entire Garland clan.

To help bring the book’s unique world to life, Wells found a showrunner in Sherman Payne, a writer on Shameless who had previously developed a script for an original series about a group of Black teens on a chess team in Harlem. “I had written about Black people, and I had written about chess, and those themes are very prevalent in Emperor of Ocean Park,” Payne says. “So, it was kind of a match made in heaven.”

A “voracious” consumer of political news, Payne was excited by the opportunity to craft a story that would move through the worlds of the federal bench and politics. He is, however, clear about one thing: He wasn’t trying to give a platform to Black conservatives, despite the fact that Judge Garland eventually becomes a mouthpiece for right-wing political groups, and Mariah is also vocal about her conservative beliefs.

Instead, as a Black man dedicated to telling stories about Black people, Payne says he was drawn to a story set in an environment and focused on the types of characters that TV and films don’t often feature. “So many stories around Black people traffic in the same old stereotypical things,” he adds. “I had not seen a Black family existing in this world with these kinds of interactions and this kind of story.”

Instrumental to fleshing out that universe was the writers’ room Payne convened — entirely filled by Black people. Moreover, three of the five people on the core writing staff were Black women. “Most of the women in the room commented that they had never been in a writers’ room with another Black woman, let alone multiple other Black women,” Payne says. “It’s really, really important for people of color to open the door for other Black people when they can, so that was a huge win for us. I hope that’s an example and inspiring for other Black showrunners.”

He says the staff wrestled with how to depict these Black conservatives — especially because audiences were likely to compare Judge Garland with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, while the outspoken Mariah seems a lot like Candace Owens, the firebrand political pundit.

The questions were simple but challenging. “How likeable do we make them, and who do we pattern them after?” Payne says. “Though I find Candace Owens’s personal politics onerous and just want to, as publicly as possible, distance myself from that stuff, she is charming and charismatic and articulate, and that is undeniable. Taking those aspects from her personality and the way she approaches things was an easy fit for us.”

Despite the story’s backdrop, Emperor of Ocean Park doesn’t spend a lot of time delving into the minutiae of the family’s politics. Payne says he was much more focused on exploring the workings of a powerful family entrenched in an influential position at the highest levels of American life.

“What I thought was exciting was depicting Black wealth in a new way,” he adds. “So often, when we see Black wealth on the screen, it’s very surface-level and showy. This was a more grounded version, where you have people who have risen to the top of their community, have stability and the benefits of being white-collar workers who have made a lot of money.” Payne says the Garland family’s status reminded him of how people treated his uncle, who was one of the first Black pharmacists in Dayton, Ohio. “That afforded him a certain level of reverence in the community,” he adds. “In the Black community, we see our doctors, our lawyers, our ministers and our pharmacists in high regard, and that’s what I wanted to get at with our depiction of the Garland family.”

Whitaker knew many viewers would look at his character and see Justice Clarence Thomas.

Like Thomas, Garland was at the center of a contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearing — though Thomas was appointed, and Garland was not. Garland becomes an outspoken advocate for white-centered conservative political groups, while Thomas presents his support more often in private gatherings and public rulings. Onscreen, Whitaker plays Garland as a rigid but deeply wounded man, well aware of how his exacting standards have tested his children and how his emotional withdrawal after the failed nomination put even more distance between them.

“I thought people might compare me to Thomas, but I tried to make him his own person,” Whitaker says. “This whole thing of honor, duty and justice that Oliver follows and teaches to his children. That phrase ‘Black excellence’ — people try to analyze what it truly means and if it’s just a way of looking at elitism. You can see it play out in their lives. And even though his children are rebelling, they are still following in his path.”

Whitaker may have thought playing Garland was a stretch, but the producers had him in mind well before they even approached him. Wells says they featured Whitaker’s photo in an early “lookbook” document assembled to help people working on the production, with no idea if he’d be interested in the part.

For Payne, landing Whitaker was like striking showbusiness gold. “I grew up watching Forest Whitaker as one of the most important actors of my generation, so I’m of the mind that he can do anything,” the showrunner says. “There is, of course, the surface-level toughness and anger and intimidating intellect the judge character has. But Forest also brought a soft, underlying fatherhood to it. It creates a dichotomy within the character that I didn’t know could be brought to the screen.”

With an Emmy, an Oscar, a Golden Globe and two Screen Actors Guild awards to his name, Whitaker has appeared in films and TV shows as diverse as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Last King of Scotland, The Shield, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Empire and Black Panther. Currently starring in the MGM+ series Godfather of Harlem as notorious gangster Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, Whitaker says streaming TV has opened up possibilities for more Black actors to have leading roles. “When I was a kid, there was maybe one Black leading man, Sidney Poitier, and then it was, like, two with Eddie Murphy and Sidney,” he says. “There was a sense that you had to wait to get your turn. Just looking at Black leading men, there’s more now than I’ve ever seen before.”

Much of the series' story is told through the perspective of Judge Garland’s son Talcott, a law professor at an Ivy League school who’s struggling to define himself outside his father’s long shadow. And in the same way Tal might have taken cues from his well-known father, actor Grantham Coleman (Lawmen: Bass Reeves) says he learned patience and leadership watching Whitaker work.

“I learned how you set the pace and how to spread kindness, joy and family amid people who are pretending to be your family when it’s two in the morning and everybody wants to go home to their actual families,” he says. Coleman also drew on his real-life experience — as the son of a lawyer who became a judge — to shape his portrayal of Tal, who he says, “unlike the other siblings, was never comfortable with [Judge Garland] as an icon or idol and was always trying to find the man.

“It is important, especially for a young Black man like Tal,” Coleman says. “He has a father that everyone loves and respects, but he sees something like, ‘Nah, that’s a man, not an idol.’”

Though Tal is the story’s protagonist in many ways, he’s also the least powerful character. Teased by his siblings, intimidated by his father and unsure of both his marriage and his place at work, he slowly unravels the truth behind his father’s life and death, prodded by Mariah. It feels a bit like The Cosby Show meets Scandal by way of The Royal Tenenbaums, though there’s another comparison Coleman didn’t recognize until they were nearly finished shooting.

“I started realizing out loud: younger brother, sister, older brother who’s cool, dad’s a judge — this is The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” he says with a laugh. “This was, like, months into it. Had never crossed my mind.”

The cast member who helped remind him of that popculture touchstone was Tiffany Mack (Jessica Jones), who plays Tal’s sister, Mariah. She also sees the Royal Tenenbaums connection — children in a high-achieving family who are still unfulfilled, feeling a bit like has-beens by the time they’ve reached adulthood.

“They couldn’t be more assimilated — a wealthy, wellmannered, well-to-do Black family,” Mack adds. “And how has that spared them from the experiences Black people face across the spectrum? They have played by the rules, and where has it gotten them, individually and as a family?”

At a time when fears that downsizing in TV production will make it tougher to tell stories about marginalized groups, Payne remains grateful that he’s been able to tell this story.

“This is a challenging mystery,” he says. “It is entertaining and exciting, but it also requires an audience that wants to stick with it and solve the mystery and hang with it like those prestige dramas we all love. If they do stick with it, they’ll get a great payoff.”

This story originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #9 , 2024, under the title "Honor Society."

Emperor of Ocean Park is executive-produced by showrunner Sherman Payne along with John Wells, Shukree Tilghman, Erin Jontow and Damian Marcano. The series is a John Wells Productions project in association with Warner Bros. Television.