*HBO’s new detective series “Get Millie Black” debuted on November 25, featuring Tamara Lawrance in the lead role. Airing Mondays at 9 p.m. on HBO and streaming on Max, the five-episode limited series explores the life of Millie-Jean Black, a groundbreaking detective unlike the usual TV archetypes.
Set in Kingston, Jamaica, “Get Millie Black” takes viewers inside Millie’s journey navigating the complexities of her homeland. The series logline reads: “Ex-Scotland Yard detective Millie-Jean Black returns to Kingston to work missing persons cases, soon finding herself on a quest to save a sibling who won’t be saved, to find a child who can’t be found, to solve a case that will blow her world apart and prove almost as tough to crack as Millie Black.”
“It’s a really powerful project and a very poignant experience for me, as a British Jamaican actress, to be able to embody this character with all of her nooks and crannies and cracks and layers, but also, ultimately, to platform a story that is a conversation between Britain and Jamaica around colonial legacy through a character who is so anti-colonial and who really fights to expose the legacy of the slave trade by revealing the ways in which it is still very much at play today,” Lawrance said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“Get Millie Black” was created and executive produced by novelist Marlon James who, in a letter sent to the press, wrote of his mother and her influence on the series.
“Before there was Millie Black, there was Detective Inspector Shirley Dillon-James, blazing a trail where there was none, and making her name by reading clues, not about what happened, but what was going to happen,” he wrote.
“My mother became famous for using book and street smarts to stop crime before it occurred by picking up on those clues that made it inevitable. You could spend most of your life figuring out such a person, and I failed while trying — but I did find inspiration for our lead,” James added.
In “Get Millie Black” Jamaica’s deep-seated homophobia, transphobia, and severe poverty are revealed, according to THR.
“Sometimes the problem is that we start to expect [simplicity] from quote-unquote, Third World entertainment, whether it’s sort of simple or slapstick, and everybody drinks a beer and goes off into the sunset or so on, and the problem with that is it creates the impression that sort of deeply, complicated art can’t come from these stories. And that’s just not true at all,” James said of shows and films not from the U.K. or the U.S.
“If I’m going to tell a story about Jamaica, it’s going to be complicated and, as the character [Millie] says in the first episode, it probably won’t add up,” he continued.
“There’s no one story about Jamaica. There’s no one story about Millie,” James said of his new series. “I think storytelling should be difficult. It should be a challenge or else it’s not worth doing.”
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