Tuesday, November 26, 2024

Get Millie Black is The Procedural We Didn't Know We Needed

 

 

I suspect it is purely a quirk of the calendar that HBO’s last original series of 2024 is a bookend of its first original series. Get Millie Black is a story about a former Jamaica resident who returns to her home country after years in self-imposed exile and finds herself following a missing persons case into a seedy underbelly that is far more complicated and bloodier than she expected.

But it says something (perhaps more about me than the show) that I was drawn in from the first ten minutes of Millie Black than I was during all of the first two episodes of Night Country (all I could stomach before I abandoned it). There are many reasons for this, some of which are about the similarities, far more about the distinct differences.

A large part of it may very well be the fact that Millie Black doesn’t have the baggage that Night Country did going into its premiere last January. For all of the impressive efforts of Issa Lopez and her cast to try and make Night Country a jump off point from all of the sexist and racist baggage of True Detective, the fact remains it had all of the things that I came to loathe about the series by the time of its second installment and were clearly present in even the first. The pace was glacial, the atmosphere oppressive, the characters apart from the two leads little more than stick figures. And for all the incredible work of Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, they were little more than the gender reversal of the kind of toxic masculinity we’ve been seeing on the show since Season 1. They were both abusive to everyone around them, they hated each other from day one, they slept with anyone they chose and formed no attachments and one was vaguely spiritual and one matter-of-fact. Throw in the fact that the series still couldn’t decide whether it was a mystery series or one with a kind of supernatural kink and Night Country remained as much a mess as every True Detective installment.

Get Millie Black has many of those same aspects but it doesn’t have any of the pretension. And it also moves at a much faster pace than any installment of True Detective ever did; we basically know everything we need to know about the title character in the first ten minutes of the show – something that it generally takes almost all of any installment of True Detective to tell us anything about the major characters. There is a note of the supernatural in Tamara Lawrence’s narration about what is happening but it doesn’t have the same baggage as the stories we would hear from Rust  Cohle or Detective Navarro because this story is taking place in Jamaica and by definition a former colony is going to have ghosts beyond the idea of the culture.

Millie-Jean Black tells her past in a brilliant seven minute opening monologue. She and her brother Orville grew up in a house of abuse under their mother, who regularly beat her son because of his tendencies towards cross-dressing at an early age. One night she actively fought back and her mother sent her to relatives in London and did everything in her power to cut off communication between the two siblings. She called to Millie her brother had gone ‘to the Gully’ and was killed a riot. When she made it clear her brother was burning in hell, Millie never spoke to her.

Millie has been haunted by that all her life and she makes it clear she worked in London in the missing persons unit ‘to work off a debt she could never repay.’ Then last year when her mother died, she learned that her brother was still alive and flew back to Kingston to atone for her sins. She didn’t expect that her brother had now renamed himself Hibiscus and has no desire to renew relations with her or even acknowledge what her sister is trying to do. In the opening minutes Millie goes to lock-up to bail Hibiscus out of jail for a prostitution charge (the guard clearly knows this and mocks Millie’s return: “Same time next week?”) Hibiscus walks away from Millie without so much as a goodbye and has no desire to have dinner with her that night, something that Millie has been making an effort at for the past year and that Hibiscus clearly resents. (We will get Hibiscus’s side of the story in the next episode.)

Millie must have been considered an outsider all her life in London but when she returns to Jamaica she is considered just as much of one. She is angry and arrogant as she must have been in London because she is good at her job and she will not bend to authority. Her boss, Baccarat, is also a Jamaican woman but she has no patience for the gamesmanship Millie tries in the episode about working a case and clearly resents her. The other detectives do not tolerate her except for her partner Curtis and Curtis, who is gay and married, barely has the patience for her transvestite brother. This may very well be the price of the baggage she’s carried her entire life and the fact that now she has no way to take it off. So we see her throw herself into her work, which involves a missing sixteen year old named Janet Fenton.

Janet is reported missing after two weeks by one of her teachers. Indeed when Millie and Curtis go to see her mother, she doesn’t seem remotely interested in her daughter’s fate. We learn Janet has been working at a strip club and there is an excellent possibility her mother has been whoring her out. It turns out Janet is connected to Freddie Somerville the son of a wealthy Jamaican white family.

In some places racism can be subtle: when it comes to the Somerville family they don’t even hide it to the people they work for or the police. Millie manages to bond with one of the domestics by spitting in the lemonade for a function which shocks to domestic – and then she spits in it herself. This is just the start of the problem: they head to the side of a robbery-homicide where Freddy is supposedly dead – but it’s not Freddy. A white Scotland Yard inspector shows up (Joe Dempsie) claiming Freddie’s involved in an investigation. Naturally he refused to comment to it, naturally Millie mocks him for his racism, and naturally her boss tells to stop being so arrogant. Freddie is involved with Janet, and there’s clearly something go on that involves children – but more than that remains to be seen.

The series comes from a short story by Marlon James, who created the series for Channel 4 in Britain. If ever you needed further evidence that the British do everything better than America when it comes to movies and TV, Get Millie Black tells you as much. Shot on location in Jamaica, it looks at the world that tourists never see. It shows us the seedy nightclubs, how slavery still has its mark here far deeper than the US and that the horrors of transphobia are as bad here as in America. In an early scene Millie tries to warn Hibiscus of the attacks on the people in her community in recent days. Hibiscus ignores her and goes back to the Gully – and that night a mob attacks and beats her friends, including one just inches away from where a terrified Hibiscus is hiding in terror.

As of this writing Get Millie Black is just a limited series but the British have even more of a tendency to tell multiple stories than we Americans have. I don’t know if there will be a second season or even if I’ll be as fascinated by the end of the first as I am after just one episode. But I do know that this is the kind of story, as with The Woman in the Wall  at the start of the year, that will draw me in quickly.

And unlike with True Detective James makes it clear what kind of story we’ll be getting. “It will end wrong. It won’t make sense. But like every story about Jamaica, it is a ghost story.” And no one needs to be told that ghost stories never have happy endings.

Note: Out of respect for the native accents of Jamaica, Get Millie Black is presented entirely with subtitles. I doubt most viewers will need them but I do appreciate them. To understand the rage, you must not miss a word.

My score: 3.75 stars.

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