Bill Dubuque and Karen Campbell on Finding The Story Behind M.I.A

The name Bill Dubuque is associated with big action on the silver screen, with The Accountant franchise, starring Ben Affleck, along with many other credits. That kind of edge-of-your-seat suspense is what Dubuque and Executive Producer Karen Campbell set out to bring to television with the Peacock⁠ crime drama M.I.A., a revenge thriller set in the Florida Keys.

“I’m fortunate in that I get to write whatever I want,” Dubuque says. “And what I wanted to do was just invent a character out of whole cloth, start that character at the lowest possible moment in her life and over the course of multiple seasons, restore the power that she lacks at the end of the first episode and see a transformation in that character.” M.I.A. follows Etta Tiger Jonze (Shannon Gisela, Strip Law), a young woman whose family owns what she understands to be a small shipping and transport in the Florida Keys. Etta learns that her family’s real business is drug-running, and her entire family is murdered by the cartel, including a ruthless enforcer named Elias (Alberto Guerra, Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!). Fleeing for her life and looking for answers, Etta finds herself immersed in Miami’s underworld. For Dubuque, M.I.A. wasn’t simply a crime story; it’s a chronicle of an evolution of identity, and Dubuque wanted audiences to understand Etta’s intelligence and scrappiness through action rather than exposition. “Writing a character, you can tell the audience that your character’s smart through dialogue or simply coming on set, but then that becomes expository and tiresome,” Dubuque says. “If you can show that, then I think the audience is with you.”

That emphasis on grounded character work is what immediately drew showrunner Campbell to the project. “What I wanted to explore was: How does this 21-year-old young woman who’s got nothing more than wit, great determination and high intelligence avenge her family in a really compelling and yet grounded way?” Campbell says. “Because she’s not a man with a special set of skills. She’s not a character with any kind of black ops training.” Rather than turning Etta into an invincible action hero, Campbell was interested in how resilience and intelligence could become survival tools within the dangerous world of Miami crime. “As she’s pursuing this dark agenda in a way that’s compelling and grounded, she winds up inadvertently building her found family along the way,” Campbell says. 

That emotional connectivity, Campbell believes, is what ultimately separates a compelling revenge saga from a hollow one. “It’s all about character,” Campbell says. “You have to invest in Etta and all of our incredibly compelling and complicated characters when it comes to television. Because if she’s just this automaton who just wants to go and kill a bunch of guys, that is not as compelling.” Instead, Campbell sees M.I.A. as a balancing act between dark momentum and emotional intimacy. “She pursues her dark agenda while inadvertently building a found family along the way,” Campbell says. “The aim is always to entertain and to move and to leave people wanting more. So you absolutely have to build in twists and turns and thrilling sequences. But at the end of the day, it’s character-driven storytelling that gets viewers to invest in television format stories.”

For Dubuque, television itself provides the ideal structure for that kind of layered storytelling. Known for both film and television work, he admitted he finds television more liberating creatively. “Television’s easier,” Dubuque says. “You’ve got 50 pages, sometimes less. So right there, I don’t have to think about what my Act Two is, what’s my midpoint turn, what’s my character’s lowest point at the end of the second act, how am I gonna wrap this sucker up?” Dubuque especially enjoys the freedom of crafting pilots. “The pilot can be really fun,” Dubuque says. “Pilots are always flashy. The pilot, in many ways, is the easiest because you’re coming up with an origin story. Your pilot is the first act of your feature film. And let’s face it, the first act of the feature film — that’s the funnest, easiest, most enjoyable act to write. That’s what a television pilot is.” 

That energy pulses throughout M.I.A., a series built on revenge, criminality and danger, but equally focused on identity, connection and transformation. Beneath the neon lights and violence of Miami’s underworld lies a character study about a young woman rebuilding herself from the ashes of tragedy — one dangerous choice at a time.

Read more film interviews conducted by Patrick Gibbs:
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