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Brilliant Husband and I recently finished watching Get Millie Black, a limited series set mostly in Jamaica. It has only five episodes. It broke my heart every episode.
I heartily recommend it with the caveats that it's violent, centers on children in peril, and uncompromisingly shows anti-trans and anti-gay hatred and violence. It's extraordinarily well written, no doubt because writer Marlon James created it based on his own short story, obviously expanded here. Tamara Lawrence, whom I memorably saw in The Long Song (on PBS), stars as Millie Black. Her mother sent her to London when she was still quite young, and she spent many years there, getting her education and then becoming a detective for Scotland Yard. In that time, her only sibling, a brother, died. She returned to Kingston after her mother died, and she saw her brother's signature on the birth certificate! It turns out she does not in fact have a brother any more; she now has a sister.
All this is backstory. Millie has largely settled into her new job in Kingston but is still trying to work out a relationship with her sister, Hibiscus or "Bis." She has a good working relationship with her partner, Curtis. Then she's asked to find a missing child, which brings up memories of a failure in London.
Get Millie Black and its characters know the tropes of genre fiction. The cast are brilliant. It was very painful to watch because they made me care so much! But it was worth it. It's as much or more about the relationships among the characters and their own personal development (or lack thereof) than a mystery, but it works equally well at both levels. Most mysteries do one or the other. Marlon James is a gay man with a complicated relationship with his homeland, and he, the directors, everyone give Jamaica a depth I hadn't seen before.
The one jarring note was that the whole series is subtitled, and you can't turn it off; you can only change the language of the subtitles. That's because the Jamaican English can be difficult at times. I found them very distracting, and I felt I didn't need them 90% or more of the time. But for that 10% or less, I did. In the end, I was glad they'd given subtitles, because the moments where I needed them were often very dramatic ones where I'd have hated to have to run it back to turn on the subtitles or listen again. I wholeheartedly applaud the way they did it: everyone is subtitled, whether they're speaking Standard British English, Jamaican Creole, or something else. It treats everyone the same, not putting any dialect above any other.
I heartily recommend it with the caveats that it's violent, centers on children in peril, and uncompromisingly shows anti-trans and anti-gay hatred and violence. It's extraordinarily well written, no doubt because writer Marlon James created it based on his own short story, obviously expanded here. Tamara Lawrence, whom I memorably saw in The Long Song (on PBS), stars as Millie Black. Her mother sent her to London when she was still quite young, and she spent many years there, getting her education and then becoming a detective for Scotland Yard. In that time, her only sibling, a brother, died. She returned to Kingston after her mother died, and she saw her brother's signature on the birth certificate! It turns out she does not in fact have a brother any more; she now has a sister.
All this is backstory. Millie has largely settled into her new job in Kingston but is still trying to work out a relationship with her sister, Hibiscus or "Bis." She has a good working relationship with her partner, Curtis. Then she's asked to find a missing child, which brings up memories of a failure in London.
Get Millie Black and its characters know the tropes of genre fiction. The cast are brilliant. It was very painful to watch because they made me care so much! But it was worth it. It's as much or more about the relationships among the characters and their own personal development (or lack thereof) than a mystery, but it works equally well at both levels. Most mysteries do one or the other. Marlon James is a gay man with a complicated relationship with his homeland, and he, the directors, everyone give Jamaica a depth I hadn't seen before.
The one jarring note was that the whole series is subtitled, and you can't turn it off; you can only change the language of the subtitles. That's because the Jamaican English can be difficult at times. I found them very distracting, and I felt I didn't need them 90% or more of the time. But for that 10% or less, I did. In the end, I was glad they'd given subtitles, because the moments where I needed them were often very dramatic ones where I'd have hated to have to run it back to turn on the subtitles or listen again. I wholeheartedly applaud the way they did it: everyone is subtitled, whether they're speaking Standard British English, Jamaican Creole, or something else. It treats everyone the same, not putting any dialect above any other.
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