On June 21, NBC will premiere the new docuseries “LA Fire & Rescue” which documents actual calls and drama while highlighting the passionate firefighters who risk their lives. The show will take a stop at the Inglewood station, where Michael Anderson and Dushone Roman pride themselves on being one of the most diverse stations as they serve as role models to their community.
Anderson and Roman spoke with rolling out about the show and their experience at Los Angeles County Fire Department’s Station 172.
What do you think makes this show interesting?
Michael Anderson: What stood out about looking at the fire service as a whole and our station in particular, our shifts happened to be all African American, which a lot of times when you go to these different areas, you don’t see a lot of African Americans like that. There’s no problem with that, but to me, it gives that one little kid hope that lives in our communities that looks at us and says “I can do it, that’s something I can strive to do,” because, they see us out there in these fire engines and all these paramedic units and it just gives them hope for the future, especially if it’s a child or a kid on the verge of going down the wrong path and making those decisions, and they’re at a crossroads in their life. I think it was a great opportunity for NBC to cover our station and also cover the LA County Fire Department as a whole.
How has your experience been working at Station 172?
Dushone Roman: Station 172 has a long history of some great people, and getting a chance to work with the people that I got a chance to work with like Mike Anderson and others was just one of a kind. People go their whole career without finding that and I was able to find it early on. I worked at a smaller agency before coming to county, and I wasn’t able to have that, so the second I was able to grab onto that I held on to it for a while. That’s why it made it easy when they said they wanted to film [us] because it was easy to just let the cameras in since we were just doing our thing. It wasn’t scripted and it wasn’t us looking at a paper and then giving you a line. You got what you got.
