Thandiwe Newton plays Grace Travis, an Oakland detective who goes off-book after her eight-year-old son is run down in the street. The first season tracks her infiltration of the Laszlo crime family, led by Marton Csokas’s Jimmy, a businessman who treats violence like accountancy. Each episode toggles between Grace’s covert sabotage and her daylight hours answering to Internal Affairs, her cover story crumbling as she sleeps with the man she’s meant to destroy.
Production shifted wholesale to Vancouver after season one, ditching Oakland’s racial texture for generic dockside warehouses. Newton later told Vulture she was contractually trapped, forced into a topless take when the director ordered her scene partner to yank down her top; she left the show at the earliest legal break and Grace’s corpse was dumped off-screen. The writers rebooted around Cole Hauser’s ex-military fixer Ethan Kelly, turning the final three seasons into a revenge carousel that chewed through twenty further episodes ordered in a single 2014 bloc.
Fifty episodes were shot across four years, each season branded with a new Ryan Bingham or City and Colour theme song to signal another tonal pivot. DirecTV’s Audience channel buried the last run in a midnight slot, cancelling it after the March 2017 finale left most characters shot or disappeared.
Production Details
Audience / 4 Seasons / 50 Episodes / 2013 - Present
Created by: Matthew Parkhill
Writer(s): Matthew Parkhill, William Schmidt
Main Cast
Thandiwe Newton as Grace Travis
Cole Hauser as Ethan Kelly
Ashley Greene as mia
Richard Schiff as Marty Stein
Sarah Carter as Harper Deakins
Sarah Jeffery as Evie Travis
Derek Luke as Marlon Dinard
Bianca Lawson as Talia Freeman
Michael Murphy as George Kelly
Kavan Smith as Tom Travis
Brendan Fletcher as Brian 'Spud' Cacelle
Andrea Roth as Marlene
