HBO’s Jamaican crime drama ‘Get Milly Black’

Schedule a viewing: This is the show you’ll want to pencil in on your calendar and unpack in your group chat.

Photo illustration: by The Cut; Photo: HBO

I understand that. There are an overwhelming number of TV shows available today. The streaming landscape is a maze of impracticalities, and the good stuff gets easily lost in the shuffle. But most of us can find one show that breaks through the noise. We call this “scheduled viewing.” That means carving out time in your busy schedule to watch the shows you want to watch with your friends the next day while they’re still fresh in your mind. Every month, read here what writer Michel Ghanem, also known as @tvscholar, thinks is worth digging into in your group chat.

Over the past year, we’ve seen everything from a turnaround in the world of True Detective to underrated dramas like The Big Mood, fascinating documentaries like Chimpanzee Crazy, and Interview with the Vampire. We’ve covered everything from reminders to make sure you’re up to date. In our final entry of the year, we travel to Jamaica for HBO’s latest crime thriller, Get Millie Black. Thank you for watching. See you here next year to see even more planned.

Go over there, Mare from Easttown, we have a new HBO detective on this case. Get Millie Black follows the tried-and-true formula of your favorite crime dramas. In other words, a detective returns to his hometown, faces his past trauma, and solves a case while doing so. Tamara Laurence gives a standout performance as the titular Millie-Jean Black, who is willing to bend the rules set by her increasingly frustrated boss in order to get to the bottom of a disappearance in Kingston, Jamaica. is showing off. After spending most of her life in England, she returned to her homeland where she trained with the police at Scotland Yard. When Millie’s mother dies, she takes back her home in Jamaica, which brings to light all her old wounds, especially memories of being exiled as a child for protecting her younger brother from her mother’s homophobic violence. is revived.

When she returns home, she reunites with her transgender sister Hibiscus (China McQueen in her acting debut). Rebuilding their relationships and working through their shared trauma becomes the heart of the show. Bringing a more literary feel to what you’d expect from a series of this kind, each episode features characters ranging from Hibiscus to a mysterious British detective (played by Skins alum Joe Dempsey) whose London cases intertwine. It is told from the characters’ point of view. With Millie. There are some other common crime drama beats as well. A red herring, a seedy strip club owner, and a charming bartender at a local watering hole that Milly ends up sleeping with. She becomes overly involved in the case, it becomes personal, and so on.

“Get Millie Black” currently airs Mondays on HBO, with the fifth and final episode scheduled for Dec. 23. Get Millie Black, a co-production between Channel 4 and HBO, is surprisingly not based on any existing intellectual property. We’re at a stage in TV production where even networks like HBO (oh, Dune: Prophecy, Penguins) are obsessed with cult-like fan bases. As we all know, reboots and adaptations do not guarantee success for a series. Fortunately, Get Milly Black is an original story created and written by Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James, who was partly inspired by his mother, who was a detective in the 1950s. Masu.

For better or worse, crime dramas are in the midst of a boom these days. Whether it’s a murder detective story like “Elsbeth” or “High Potential,” a popular spy story like “Slow Horses” or “Black Dove,” or a new twist on the conventional murder mystery story like “Poker.” This includes programs that include faces and bad sisters. And don’t get me started on true crime. “Get Milly Black” falls somewhere in the middle of the experimental genre. The central case is familiar enough to navigate the developments and piece the story together without getting lost, but it’s the setting and performances that elevate it above TV’s regular crime show. be.

There is far too little coverage of the Jamaican diaspora on Western television (the excellent comedy Dreaming While Black, previously featured in this column), and even less coverage of Jamaica itself. That’s what made Hulu’s all-too-soon-cancelled “Black Cake” a TV maverick. Kingston himself is a character here. Class differences between the white families that own downtown strip clubs and wealthy uptown mansions, color and architecture, and the influence of colonialism are aspects of the show that the creators are keenly aware of. The soundtrack also has strong Jamaican influences, including an opening credits song created by Jamaican music collective Equiknoxx Music, with Millie slipping in and out of patois depending on who she’s talking to and the context of the conversation.

The incident itself is nothing special, and it’s not nearly as compelling as the story leading up to the final reveal in Mares of Easttown, but there’s a lot more to glean here. . It’s rare to see such a rich depiction of queerness in this genre, unless you’re watching Prime Video’s very gay dark comedy Deadlock . This is realized not only through Hibiscus’s return to her true nature and the local community of transgender and queer youth living in the drains, but also through Millie’s detective work as she lives with her boyfriend and faces another case. This is also achieved by following his partner, Curtis (Gershwin Eustache Jr.). A kind of oppression. Get Milly Black is an ambitious portrait of a rich character that sets it apart from its contemporaries.

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