50 Cent Talks ‘Exciting’ New ‘Hip Hop Homicides’ Series

We caught up with Curtis ’50 Cent’ Jackson during the 2022 Television Critics Summer Press Tour on August 10 to speak about his upcoming docuseries “Hip Hop Homicides.”

The rapper/actor and entrepreneur teamed with “Love & Hip Hop” EP Mona Scott Young for the series that will try to solve some of rap’s most notorious killings. “Hip Hop Homicides” will be hosted by former TMZ reporter Van Lathan, and will air later this year on WeTV and the streaming service ALLBLK.

“Hip Hop Homicides,” is an eight-part series set to air on WeTV that will highlight unsolved murders, according to Deadline. It will also explore “the staggering number of unsolved murders in the hip hop community in an attempt to uncover details of what really happened,” per the website.

During TCA, Scott-Young noted that this series is “about looking at the entire picture, the environment, the socioeconomic circumstances, the things that these rappers experienced in their lives that led them into these situations. So we were not only hoping to uncover new leads, we were hoping to get answers for the fans and the families.”

She continued, “And we also wanted to humanize them and allow the fans and the general public alike to see them in a different light and to understand that their deaths were due to a variety of reasons and there were a number of things that we wanted people to look at from a wholistic standpoint.”

Scott-Young also noted that many of the cases featured in the series “were just not investigated thoroughly.”

“And our goal was in the best case scenario to get answers, but at very minimum to get to the bottom of things that were widely talked about, widely known, but never had been researched properly,” she said. 

Lathan added, “We start off with questions about each individual case. We start off about questions about each individual rapper that was on the show. And once we got to the cities — being Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, here in L.A., wherever — these stories took on a life of their own. And so what we decided to do was follow where the actual questions were leading us. And I think that led to us creating a much, much, much more compelling, grounded, and human story for all of these individuals that unfortunately lost their lives.”

When EUR asked Jackson during TCA what he hopes rappers and fans alike take from the series, he explained that these homicides are not rooted in rap beefs, but in the circumstances of one’s environment.

“This is happening from other situations that happen in inner cities,” he said.

Like Pop Smoke for instance, this is a robbery that takes place. It has nothing to do with the things that he said in his music, you know, and if anything, the things that he said in his music would sway you away from looking at him as the robbery target,” Jackson explained.

“I think that a lot of the artists, I hope they get a chance to see the perspectives of the other people around and how they hurt and not necessarily want to do that to someone else. But there’s an opportunity for them to look and learn from the experience,” he continued.

I’m a part of the first episode because of my relationship with Pop Smoke. So it just loans itself to being exciting television based on who these actual artists were and where they could’ve went in their trajectory.”