Review: ‘American Crime’ Fixes on Migrant Dreamers in the Fields

CreditCreditNicole Wilder/ABC

The third season of “American Crime,” the gritty ABC drama with an investigative heart, will unspool just as President Trump’s proposed border wall will be generating a lot of discussion. The series wants a piece of that debate, but not the obvious one about cost and necessity. It wants you to ponder just why anyone would want to work the fields of the giant farms that are so important to the United States economy.

This season of the anthology show, which has its premiere on Sunday night, has an unexpected setting, given the big-agriculture theme: It takes place not out West, but in North Carolina, where tens of thousands of Spanish-speaking migrant workers help bring in crops of fruits and vegetables. Structurally, the series uses one crime to illuminate an array of story lines and issues, and this season eventually follows that template, but it also suggests that the bigger crime is the exploitation and poor treatment of workers on the lowest rung of the economic ladder.

In the show’s first two seasons, Regina King won Emmys for her work, and she is strong again in Season 3 as a social worker who wants very much to conceive a child. But she may have competition in the accolade department this time from Benito Martinez, playing Luis, a father who makes his way — illegally — to North Carolina from Mexico to search for his son.

Luis knows that the young man worked in the fields before the family stopped hearing from him, so though Luis is not a farmhand, he masquerades as one, discovering a world where workers are trapped by debts to those who smuggled them and provide their wretched housing. John Ridley, the series’s creator, has never tiptoed around the issues he attacks, and he’s particularly blunt here, showing brutality by the overseers who manage the workers, sexual assaults on female migrants and more.

In among the foreign migrant workers is the American-born Connor (Coy Henson). View him as Mr. Ridley’s response to the argument that illegal immigrants are taking jobs from American workers. Connor, a drug addict trying to get clean, can’t handle the hard labor, and he’s pretty much the only Caucasian in the fields. Americans are not exactly lined up to fill the backbreaking, low-paying jobs. The contractors who provide workers to the big farms have to lie and obfuscate to get anyone, legal or illegal, to jump in their trucks.

If this show leaves you wondering who will pick those acres of tomatoes in Mr. Trump’s walled-off future, some farm operators are wondering the same thing. But this ambitious third season has more on its mind. The characters also include Nicholas and Clair Coates (Timothy Hutton and Lili Taylor), who run a furniture business that is struggling to maintain quality workmanship while keeping costs competitive.

That’s the same issue, essentially, facing Jeanette Hesby (Felicity Huffman), who has married into a family that owns one of those big tomato farms. The more she learns about what the operation does to make money, the more it troubles her.

So this incarnation of “American Crime” wants us to think more deeply about what it takes to bring us the products we expect at the price we want to pay. In the broader sense, the season is skeptical about various versions of the American dream. Everything, it seems, comes at a painfully high cost, even that baby Ms. King’s character so desperately wants. The in vitro procedures she has been trying are punishingly expensive, and, just as with an illegal immigrant’s border-crossing grasp at a better life, there is no guarantee of success.

Yes, the series sometimes grows a bit preachy: This installment, like its predecessors, tends to indulge in extended scenes whose dialogue can sound as if it were from a PBS documentary or a newspaper exposé. But you have to admire the ability of Mr. Ridley and his actors to wrap the earnestness in a compelling package.

American Crime
Sundays on ABC

A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Migrant Dreamers in the Fields. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe