Over the past week, I have found myself cringing at a series of tabloid articles describing Get Millie Black as a rival to the BBC’s Death in Paradise. Sure, both shows are set on Caribbean islands and feature black British police officers who used to work for the Metropolitan force. But that is truly where the similarities end. The comparisons have reminded me of the old advertising maxim about King Charles and Ozzy Osbourne: they are both British men born in 1948 who have been married twice and have pots of money. But, well, they don’t exactly have a ton in common, do they?
And so to Get Millie Black, which isn’t a soapy murder mystery with a surfeit of former EastEnders stars, but rather an ambitious five-part drama based on a short story by Booker prize winner Marlon James, and adapted by the man himself. Touching on discrimination against LGBTQ+ Jamaicans, police corruption, people-smuggling and the echoes of colonialism that continue to ring out, it doesn’t exactly take a chipper “case of the week” approach. Where it does slip into well-worn procedural territory, the excellent performances and general sense of unease seeping out of almost every scene keep it on track, in the same vein as True Detective and Mare of Easttown before it.
Our heroine – played ably, and often hauntingly, by Small Axe’s Tamara Lawrance – is a Jamaican-born Briton and former Scotland Yard detective, who has found herself back on the island of her birth (there was, she quips, “only so much shitty weather and institutionalised racism I could take”). Her abusive mother is dead, but the brother she thought was also deceased is alive, if not totally well. In the Gully – a storm drain repurposed as slum housing for Kingston’s outcasts – Millie reunites with her sibling, now known as Hibiscus, or Bis (the excellent Chyna McQueen, in her first screen role), a self-assured yet vulnerable sex worker and owner of the world’s best voicemail message (“You’ve reached Bis – now state your biz!”). The scenes they share are the connective tissue of the series, as James delves into the lifelong trauma of growing up as a transgender woman in Jamaica and the splintered relationship between the two sisters. Similarly, we learn how Millie’s colleague Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) has concealed his identity as a gay man in a nation still blighted by homophobia, posturing as a straight “stud”. Each episode is lightly filtered through the experiences of a different narrator, a stylistic touch that also takes us further into each character’s psyche without veering too far from the A plot.
Crucial to that plot, of course, is the crime that Black is trying to unpick: a missing person case involving an impressionable black teenager, who seems to have been groomed by the scion of an influential white family. What does the smarmy Freddie Summerville want with schoolgirl Janet, and how does their icky “relationship” connect to a wider hunt for Freddie – and a possible people-trafficking ring? Cleverly, the racial tensions therein are also mirrored in Black’s own fractious relationship with her colleague Luke Holborn. A white superintendent dispatched from London to track down Freddie, he is played with just the right amount of mansplainy condescension by Joe Dempsie.
The episodes set in Jamaica are an easy five stars, and the Caribbean cast get all the best lines, not least when Millie and Curtis are described by their shouty colleague as “bench and batty” – in other words, joined at the hip. It is only later, as Black swaps one small island for another and comes back to London, that the criminal conspiracy at the core of the whole thing begins to feel a little holey. We also lose that central relationship between Bis – who is back in Jamaica – and Millie, which underscores just how vital it was in the first place.
The character of Millie-Jean Black, however, is a force of nature, and a joy to watch, wherever she is in the world. Lawrance conveys her angst and her unshakeable conviction, as well as code-switching seamlessly between her British and Jamaican accents in the way that many people do without realising when back in the motherland. This isn’t Death in Paradise. But if you’re OK with a little more blood and a little less whimsy, you may find it just as good – or even better.
• Get Millie Black is on Channel 4 now in the UK and Binge in Australia
