Last evening (March 22) was the series premiere of FOX’s racially charged new hit series Shots Fired. The show examines a fatal shooting that took place in North Carolina that involved a police officer shooting an unarmed teenager, leaving a community up in arms.

In recent years, we’ve seen so many fatal cases of untrained and unprepared police officers taking the lives of several teenagers, mostly African Americans, who they believe pose a threat even though they were unarmed the whole time. We’ve seen it happen countlessly with the tragic loss of Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice and so many others, an it’s become an epidemic requiring immediate change.

While the idea of, “police shooting an unarmed victim” has become such an unfortunate reality in the African American community mainly, Shots Fired decided to tackle the issue head on, but from a different angle, where the races are reversed.

The show is based on a real-life story of a black officer shooting an unarmed white teenager in North Carolina and according to the show’s creators, they went this route to create empathy among those viewers who may not have that same empathy when it happens in real life in the black community.

“That case … forces a segment of the audience to look at it from a different view,” co-creator Reggie Rock Bythewood told NPR. “[It] forces people, in a way, to say ‘What if that was your child? … What if it looked like your son?’ It challenges the audience more.”

Gina Prince-Bythwood, Rock’s wife and co-creator of the show, spoke on the infamous Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case and said that the joy certain people felt when he was acquitted inspired her to re-tell the story in a way that would maybe change their thinking.

“It was shocking to us after the Zimmerman verdict — it was so personal and emotional to us and to our son,” she says to NPR. “And then to turn on the TV or go online and see people start to make excuses for everything that happened. And it felt that they weren’t seeing Trayvon as their child.”

Tensions between the police community and the African American community have risen significantly over the last handful of years and change is needed. It seems as if every week, there’s another case of an unarmed black person being killed at the hands of police. Shots Fired has truly imitated reality with art and the timing couldn’t be more fitting.

While it was possible that re-telling this story “wouldn’t work” or that the overall message would get lost in the cinema, episode 1 of Shots Fired gives us faith that this new TV series is going to make a true impact on the way people view police involved shootings from here on out. No matter what race is involved.