If you’ve spent time in The Rookie fandom spaces, you’ve likely seen plenty of grumbling about James Murray (Arjay Smith), the community center owner and Nyla Harper’s (Mekia Cox) husband. For many fans, James has become the definition of a necessary but frustrating character: Steady to the point of bland, overly cautious, and often out of sync with Nyla’s energy. But what’s interesting is that this isn’t the first time Smith has ended up in the muddle of a storyline that left viewers frustrated. Long before The Rookie, Smith appeared in the final season of Sons of Anarchy as Grant McQueen—a role tied to one of the show’s most unpopular late-game plotlines. Put simply, if you think James Murray is a hard watch, Grant McQueen might just have him beat.
James Murray was always meant to be a stabilizing influence in Nyla’s life. After so many years of undercover work, single parenthood, and riding the hectic cycles of patrol work, Nyla required a presence that was stable. James fit that description on paper: he had a community center to manage, he offered her the stability she needed, and he had a life outside the LAPD — he still does. But whereas that plan plays well on paper, it doesn’t come together in practice.
The issue with James is not that he’s inherently “bad” or poisonous, it’s that he’s almost aggressively bland. With a show like The Rookie, where pretty much every relationship has some degree of tension, subterfuge, or unpredictability, James is the stick in the mud in the worst way. When Nyla presses him, he withdraws; when she becomes assertive, he warns against it. That conflict would have been compelling had it offered something new about Nyla, but it largely does the opposite.
In Season 4, Episode 11, Nyla and James make their first appearance while on a walk in the morning, with the latter talking about how he is glad to be spending time with her. During the same conversation, they had a short back-and-forth discussion about how she wanted to be at his side for a conversation he was going to have with Curtis Jones, a peripheral figure in a recent case. James immediately shot down the idea, not wanting a cop hovering over his shoulder to avoid losing the trust of those in the community he serves. When she brought up the fact that he was dating a cop, he countered by saying that he needed to work extra hard to stay independent. The topic fizzled out after she told him that she didn’t like not being able to have his back.
Later in the episode, while Nyla is out on patrol with The Rookie alum Tru Valentino’s Aaron Thorsen, viewers find out that she is staking out James’s conversation with Curtis; Nyla and Aaron would’ve otherwise gone unnoticed during this somewhat illicit stakeout had it not been for a theft a block away, whom they had to pursue. As soon as Nyla sped out of her shop to catch the criminal, James caught her eye, looking irritated that she’d done the opposite of what they’d discussed. In her pursuit, Nyla also manages to get a cut worthy of stitches, causing her to go to the hospital and find out that she was pregnant.
When it came time for James to find out, his reaction was less than enthusiastic by miles, all because he was upset with her for breaking her promise of letting him handle the matter of Curtis alone. Of course, they make up later, and he ends up being ecstatic about the news in the end. Still, the writing turns James into a roadblock in the narrative rather than an encouraging partner. James fails to add depth to her character by accidentally flattening it instead.
‘Sons of Anarchy’ Stumbled With Grant McQueen in Its Final Season
Throughout Sons of Anarchy’s final season, Smith played Grant, one of the members of the Grim Bastards who became caught up in a plot many felt was unnecessary and distracting. Like James, Grant was portrayed as a good guy who struggled to cope with adversity. His inclusion in an end-of-season subplot, though, only served to feel like filler in a show already overburdened with too many storylines. Audiences who remained loyal to Sons during its rough, bloody course were expecting a payoff, not some half-baked narrative concerning a person they didn’t even know.
While Grant’s story had the makings of something impactful — a son trying to protect his mother from a corrupt housing deal and a predatory pastor—the way the show used him fell flat. Introduced in the middle of Season 7, Grant and his mother, Loutreesha (April Grace), became pawns in Jax Teller’s (Charlie Hunnam) war against August Marks (Billy Brown). They weren’t so much fleshed-out characters as they were narrative conveniences.
The biggest issue was timing. Son’s of Anarchy’s seventh season had dozens of threats to juggle, including Jax’s collapse after Tara’s death, Gemma’s (Katey Segal) self-inflicted guilt trip, SAMCRO destiny, and the looming question of whether the club itself could be salvaged. Viewers were eager to watch these plotlines intersect in the final stretch of the series. Instead, the main cast’s screen time was stolen by the McQueen subplot. Grant was a new character, and writers didn’t give fans the chance to get attached to him — and without that, the tension of his scenes never really stuck.
What could’ve been an emotionally rich storyline (a son torn between loyalty to his mother and fear of powerful men) was instead played as a clumsy plot device. Even Grant’s most dramatic moments, like striking Montez with a tire iron or freezing as Bobby was executed in front of him, didn’t deepen his character. They reinforced the sense that he was there to move chess pieces of Jax’s war against August rather than to exist as a character in his own right. The problem isn’t Smith, who plays both roles with great conviction. It is the writing in both shows that positions his characters as background players rather than fully realized people, and that’s a shame.
