By Variety | Created at 2024-11-25 14:33:37 | Updated at 2024-11-26 21:24:54
1 day ago
Television is clogged full of mystery series. HBO alone has had several breakout hits in recent years, including “Mare of Eastown,” “The Undoing” and the most recent installment in the “True Detective” franchise. However, with its singular location and distinct characters, “Get Millie Black,” the network’s latest five-episode limited series set in Kingston, Jamaica, stands on its own. Created by Booker Prize-winning novelist Marlon James, who adapted the show from his own short story, “Get Millie Black,” begins as a missing persons case and evolves into a massive web of corruption and violence stretching beyond the shores of Jamaica onto the streets of London.
When the audience is first introduced to Millie Black, she and her young brother Orville are basking in the sun. Songs, secrets and nail polish act as a reprieve from their abusive mother. Sadly, the siblings’ childhood innocence is destroyed when, following an altercation, Millie is shipped off to the U.K. as punishment. Sometime after her arrival, she learns Orville has died. Some two decades later, in the wake of her mother’s death, Millie (an exceptional Tamara Lawrance) leaves her detective role at London’s Scotland Yard and returns to Kingston. She discovers Orville is now Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen). Feeling abandoned by Millie, Hibiscus has also been hardened by childhood trauma and a country that has criminalized her identity and her profession: sex work.
Millie’s role as a missing persons detective for Jamaica’s police force consumes her. While working the case of a missing teen girl, Janet Fenton (an outstanding Shernet Swearine), who has seemingly gotten caught up with an older affluent man, Freddie Summerville (Peter John Thwaites), Millie and her partner Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) begin uncovering something much bigger than one lost girl. It’s a massive and complex criminal web that gets the attention of Scotland Yard rising star Superintendent Luke Holborn (Joe Dempsie), who comes to Kingston to aid the investigation.
Since the debut of the acclaimed drama “The Harder They Come” in 1972, films and television shows about Jamaica have been few and far between. There have, of course, been glossier glimpses of the island in movies like “Bob Marley: One Love” and “How Stella Got Her Groove Back.” But, James’ depiction, directed by Tanya Hamilton, is authentic and immersive. In “Get Millie Black,” Jamaica teeters under colonialism’s crushing weight and legacy. Its society is also choking under homophobic laws, which keep a burgeoning queer community isolated and constantly endangered. The white sand beaches and the blue waters of the Caribbean Sea are never in the frame here. Instead, viewers are immersed in Millie’s Kingston, with dialogue spoken almost entirely in Jamaican patois, where opportunities are limited, gang violence persists and whiteness is still put on a pedestal.
In addition to this gritty, nuanced view of the lush island, James carefully unpacks the psychological motivations of the central figures in the story. A different character narrates each of the five episodes. (Critics received four for review.) Despite gaining a sister in Hibiscus, Millie has never forgotten the anguish of losing Orville. Therefore, she’s compelled to save as many lost children as she can without regard for job protocols or her safety and well-being. For her part, Hibiscus is motivated by freedom and the ability to live her life on her terms. Yet, her late mother’s hate and rage continually haunt her at every turn. Luke’s obsession with rising in the ranks at Scotland Yard leads him all the way to Jamaica. Finally, Janet is hyper-fixated on something more simplistic: the life she feels she deserves.
“Get Millie Black” works well as a gory whodunit (with a genuinely unnerving twist at the center). But the outstanding performances and the crimes in this setting make the show unique. James, who based Millie on his mother, Detective Inspector Shirley Dillon-James, presents a deeply engaging world of characters driven by their unbridled impulses and haunted by ghosts they can’t exorcise.
“Get Millie Black” premieres Nov. 25 on HBO, with new episodes dropping weekly on Mondays.
