Elgin James has led a more eventful life than most TV writers. He grew up on a farm in rural New England, mixed-race himself, in an adoptive family and with an abusive father. He was arrested for the first time at the age of 12. He went on to found the Boston punk gang FSU in the late 1980s; their name originally stood for F— Shit Up, and they stood – and often fought – against drug-dealers and white supremacists. 

In 2005, James, then 37, was involved in the attack on and extortion of a man linked to white-power politics. In July 2009, though he had left the FSU, that extortion caught up with him. James was arrested, and two years later, was staring down the barrel of a one-year prison sentence.

And yet, what makes James’s story all the more remarkable is how his burgeoning screenwriting career is wrapped like ivy around it. When he was arrested, he had only just learned that his directorial debut, Little Birds (2011), had secured the funding it needed. The film was the product of the Sundance Screenwriters labs, which had transformed his life, helping him understand how to express himself through writing rather than violence. 

James tells me that he was leaving his house to walk his dogs when the FBI emerged with their guns drawn. “I was just like – ‘Oh. There it goes. It’s all done. I was so close.’” But the help he received from industry friends such as Robert Redford and Ed Harris, and Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke, helped him scrabble to finish the film before he served his sentence. Little Birds was released shortly before he was imprisoned. As he puts it now: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” 

Over a decade later, James’s knowledge of gangs is invaluable for his work as showrunner of the TV crime drama Mayans MC, a spin-off of Sons of Anarchy. But it also comes in handy for the project he is discussing with me: The Outlaws, the Bristolian community service comedy-drama that James and Stephen Merchant – however unlikely that might sound – created together. 

It began, James seems to remember, when his agent mentioned that Merchant wanted to meet him. Encounters like this in Hollywood don’t always go well, James says, because “Hollywood is the worst place on Earth and full of the worst people on Earth”. He and Merchant hit it off immediately, though their worlds couldn’t have been much further apart. “We come from different walks of life and we also look very different,” he says. “He’s obviously tall and white, I’m short and brown. We look like a comedy skit.”