Kanan Stark (Mekai Curtis) sits at a diner table along with his friends and family, joking around and smiling. As they step outside, a car slows down and gunshots fire. Just as quickly as they could smile inside, they duck.

Power Book III: Raising Kanan takes a dive into the origins of Kanan Stark, a prominent character in the Power series, and shows us how he got brought into his mother’s business and the world of drug dealing. However, behind the tensions of the family business, there is a story centered around a family with familiar family struggles. 

Creator, executive producer, and showrunner Sascha Penn made sure the series sustained its roots as a family drama as he ventured into creating the prequel of 50 Cent's character in Power. 

“People see these shows, and whether it's Power or Raising Kanan, they see these shows and they're like, ‘Oh, these are drug shows, they’re shows about crime,’” Penn said. “And it's like, ‘no, they’re not.’” 

The core of the series explores the relationship between Kanan and his mother Raquel (Patina Miller). 

“It is about a mother and son navigating their way through a very complicated and stakes-filled world and time,” he said. 

“But at its heart, it's about this family and how they relate to each other, how they understand each other, how they're connected to each other.” 

The series incorporates the same family drama we experience in our day to day. There will be those we love and those we struggle to make peace with. Penn said they made sure to bring those familiar experiences into the writers room. 

“As we sit in that writers room, you know, that's the stuff that we all lean on as we're talking about these characters in these stories; like, we're always thinking about our own families, and the people we know and love and people we know and maybe don't love quite as much,” he said. 

Penn was initially approached by writer-producer Courtney A. Kemp and 50 Cent to make the prequel with a similar approach to Goodfellas. They wanted to do a period piece centered on Kanan, loosely based on 50 Cent's real life growing up in South Jamaica, Queens. 

“Courtney and 50 both gave me a ton of creative latitude to do what I felt like I needed to do to create these characters in this world and these stories,” he said. 

Penn said what made Power work as a show was its focus on the family drama. It allowed characters to resonate with people even if they didn’t grow up in a similar environment. 

“I think a lot of what we as writers did with those characters is we wanted to, we wanted the relationships to feel real and organic, not just to the time, but just to kids in general,” he said. 

Writing about teens allowed the team to explore the characters they remember growing up with and the ones with whom they would connect. Famous (Antonio Ortiz) is a good guy with an energy that makes you love him no matter what. Jukebox (Hailey Kilgore) is someone who you know you can confide in and count on. Working on the series allowed Penn to make the ultimate friend group. 

“It’s always amazing to have this opportunity to be a full-grown adult and write about teenagers,” he said.

“I think a lot of it is just imagining these kids as kids you’d want to hang out with, kids you want to know.” 

His exploration of the family drama comes from the book Top of the Rock by Warren Littlefield. The book mentions that every great show turns into family dramas, no matter what the environment. Whether it takes place in a hospital or a firehouse, the characters become a makeshift family that viewers are invested in, Penn said. The same goes for Power and Raising Kanan, even with what they share. 

“What it really does share is these characters and their relationships to each other and the complexities of those relationships,” he said. 

One of the pivotal complex relations is the one between mother and son. Although tumultuous at times, the pitfalls of parenting are a given, and the love between the two remains despite the tensions that arise. Penn brought in his own experience of parenting to share how no matter what, parenting will always be an uphill battle. 

“We're very much shaped by our parents, obviously, in good and bad ways,” he said.

“I'm a parent myself and I spend a lot of time worrying am I fucking up my kid.’” 

Every relationship is different but the struggle to do the best for your kid remains, even for Kanan and Raq. 

“I think in the case of Raq and Kanan, she does love her son profoundly, but she loves him in the way that she can love him,” Penn said.

“She’s also a narcissist, and so there's that challenge of like, she's hooked on herself, but she also really loves her son.” 

Aside from developing a family narrative, Penn also faces the challenge of telling the origin story of Kanan, a character that goes from your everyday teenager to a sociopathic character as seen in Power.

“It’s not interesting to tell a story about a sociopath when he's a sociopath and he's 15 years old, that's not a real interesting character,” he said.

“He has to get there, so the challenge — the real fundamental challenge of the whole series, as when I first, when it was first presented to me — is how do I take this kid and turn him into that guy?” 

A lot of it is done incrementally to develop Kanan’s character at a steady pace and share what got him to where he is in Power. Penn said he couldn’t have made the characters possible without the talent behind them, including the actors and crew. He believes the show deserves the acclaim it has received so far, but still feels a deep-rooted issue with how it has been treated in media and awards. In a social media post, he criticized mainstream publications for neglecting to review the show. He said he doesn’t care for a good review, but that it gets reviewed in the first place. 

“To not acknowledge the show's existence, to not acknowledge is something else completely different,” he said. 

Penn thinks back to the promises made in the entertainment industry to highlight and uplift voices often ignored in film and TV at the height of summer 2020. 

“There's all this talk of being woke and whatnot and I feel like a lot of that is just fucking window dressing,” Penn said. 

Despite the issues that have arisen out of its reception (or lack thereof), Penn still applauds the talent who made the words come to life. 

“As a writer, when you actually get the opportunity to work with other people, it's so exciting and so like, energizing and inspiring because you get to pull yourself away from your computer and away from your own fucking brain,” he said.

“And you get to see how other people do their jobs and learn from them, which makes you better at your job.”