There’s a New HBO Detective on the Case

We get it: There’s an overwhelming number of television shows right now. The streaming landscape is an impractical maze, and the good stuff easily gets lost in the shuffle. But most of us can still find one show that cuts through the noise. We call this “appointment viewing” — or the time you carve out in your busy schedule to watch the show you’ll want to unpack the next day with your friends while it’s still on your mind. Tune in here each month to read what writer Michel Ghanem, a.k.a. @tvscholar, deems worthy of a group-chat deep dive.

Over the past year, we’ve covered everything from a return to form in the True Detective world, underrated dramedies like Big Mood, a juicy docuseries in Chimp Crazy, and a reminder to catch up on Interview With the Vampire. In our last entry for the year, we travel to Jamaica for Get Millie Black, HBO’s latest crime thriller. Thank you for tuning in, and see you back here next year for more appointment viewing.

You’re telling me there’s another crime show on TV now?

Move over, Mare of Easttown, there’s a new HBO detective on the case. Get Millie Black follows the tried-and-true formula of some of our favorite crime dramas: a detective who returns home to face her past trauma and solve a case while she’s at it. Tamara Lawrance gives a stand-out performance as titular Millie-Jean Black, who is, of course, willing to bend the rules established by her increasingly frustrated boss to get to the bottom of a missing-person’s case in Kingston, Jamaica. She moves back home after spending the majority of her life in England, where she trained with Scotland Yard’s police force. When Millie’s mother dies, she repossesses her house in Jamaica, which opens up all kinds of old wounds, particularly her memories of being sent away as a child for protecting her brother against their mother’s homophobic violence.

Now back home, she reconnects with her sibling, who is now her transgender sister, Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen in her acting debut). Rebuilding their relationship and moving through their shared trauma becomes the beating heart of the show. Bringing a more literary vibe to what you might expect from this kind of series, each episode is narrated from a different character’s point of view, from Hibiscus to a mysterious British detective (played by Skins alum Joe Dempsie) whose case back in London is intertwined with Millie’s. And there are a few other usual crime-drama beats: red herrings, a suspicious strip-club owner, a local watering hole with a hot bartender Millie ends up sleeping with. She gets overly involved in the case, it gets personal, and so on.

How can I watch it?

Get Millie Black is currently airing on Mondays on HBO, with the fifth and final episode scheduled for December 23. A co-production between Channel 4 and HBO, Get Millie Black is surprisingly not based on any previously existing intellectual property. We are in a phase of television production that is obsessed with cult fan bases, even for networks like HBO (ahem, Dune: Prophecy and The Penguin). As we know, a reboot or adaptation does not guarantee a successful series. Luckily, Get Millie Black is an original story created and penned by Marlon James, a Booker Prize–winning novelist — although one partially inspired by his mother who was a detective in the 1950s.

Well, how does it compare to the zillion other detective dramas on TV these days?

For better or worse, we are in a crime-drama boom — be it murder-detective procedurals like Elsbeth and High Potential, popular spy stories like Slow Horses and Black Doves, or shows with new twists on the conventions of the murder mystery like Poker Face and Bad Sisters. And don’t even get me started on all the true crime. Get Millie Black falls somewhere in the middle on the spectrum of genre experimentation — the central case feels familiar enough to navigate the twists and piece together the story without getting lost, but it’s the setting and performances that elevate it beyond TV’s usual crime fare.

There are far too few stories about the Jamaican diaspora in Western television (we’ve covered one in this column before, the excellent comedy Dreaming Whilst Black) and even fewer about Jamaica itself. It’s what made Hulu’s too-quickly cancelled Black Cake an outlier in the TV landscape. Here, Kingston itself is a character: the class distinctions among the downtown strip clubs and the wealthy mansion-owning white families uptown, the colors and architecture, and the impacts of colonialism — an aspect the show the creator is acutely aware of. Even the soundtrack thumps with Jamaican influences, like the opening-credits song produced by Jamaican music collective Equiknoxx Music, and Millie slips in and out of patois, depending on who she’s speaking to and the context of her conversation.

The case itself is nothing to write home about, and not as compelling as what built up to the final reveal in Mare of Easttown, but there’s much more to extract here. It’s rare in this genre — unless you’re watching Prime Video’s very gay dark comedy Deadloch — to see such a rich depiction of queerness. This is materialized through Hibiscus coming into her own, and her local community of trans and queer youth who live in a storm drain, but also by following Millie’s detective partner, Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr), who lives with his boyfriend and faces a different kind of oppression. Get Millie Black is ambitiously painting rich character studies, setting it apart from its contemporaries.