This TV series will be filming for the first time at the Grand Prix in Long Beach

Location filming in Long Beach aually goes on hiatus for a couple of weeks at Grand Prix time, with the city’s cops, fire and special-events people too busy with events around the track to monkey around with Hollywood.

This year, TV crews are getting a rare pass to film at the Grand Prix during its April 15-17 run.

The film crews are involved with a familiar title around Long Beach with new faces: “Lethal Weapon,” a Fox-TV series based on the successful film franchise that starred Mel Gibson and Day Glover. In the small-screen version, Damon Wayans takes on the Glover role, with Clayne Crawford (of Sundance TV’s “Rectify”) taking on the Gibson character.

The four-film “Lethal Weapon” movie series has a huge Long Beach presence, with the action-heavy openings of the first and fourth films in the series shot in Long Beach.

In 1987’s “Lethal Weapon,” the Inteational Tower at 700 East Ocean Blvd., was the setting for the opening, in which a young woman wakes up in bed, swallows some drugs and leaps off a top-floor of the 32-story building. In the subsequent investigation, you get a nice look down Ocean at the Villa Riviera.

The cast and crew retued to Long Beach for a lengthy stay in downtown’s East Village, where workers built a gas station and fake storefronts along the 400 block of East First Street and then proceeded to blow up everything in a scene that began with a crazed man with a flamethrower torching trees, cars and storefronts and ended with him being tued into a human torpedo, rocketing into a tanker at the gas station which exploded in a huge ball of flames.

The upcoming retu of “Lethal Weapon” as a TV episode won’t be anywhere near as spectacular.

Grand Prix Association of Long Beach president and CEO Jim Michaelian told us that the crews for the show will just be filming crowd shots and b-roll footage. “They’re not allowed to film any racing scenes.”

It’s rare that any filming takes at the Grand Prix. The unremarkable Sylvester Stallone racing film, “Driven,” made use of the track for the 2001 movie. “They filmed a ton of stuff at the race,” said Michaelian, “but the only things they used was a helicopter shot of the hairpin tu and a few background shots.”

The Fox-TV cooking competition show “Hell’s Kitchen” filmed an episode at the track in 2011, the year in which the show’s chief chef Gordon Ramsay was the Grand Prix’s grand marshal.