Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic “Like every other story about this country, it’s a ghost story.” The voiceover that opens Get Millie Black is at once accusation, confession and acknowledgment. Spoken by the eponymous Jamaican protagonist of Booker Prize winner Marlon James’s debut television series, it recognises the unavoidable spectre of colonialism.TV drama invariably views Caribbean life through one of two lenses, both of them haunted by this ghost. On the one hand, there are the tourist-brochure staples of sun-kissed beaches, cocktails and light reggae, as seen in the BBC’s cosy-crime warhorse Death in Paradise. On the other, there are narratives freighted with generational trauma, whether it is the (very different) slavery narratives of period pieces The Long Song or The Confessions of Frannie Langton, the Windrush ripples of Three Little Birds and Small Island, or the guns, gangsters and ghettos of Top Boy. Get Millie Black skews closer to the latter, but depicts lives rarely seen on screen with vivid authenticity. Tamara Lawrance (the lead in 2018’s Andrea Levy adaptation The Long Song) plays the Jamaica-born detective who is back working missing-persons cases in Kingston three years after being forced out of London’s Metropolitan Police. Uneasily reconciled with Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen), the trans sister she left behind with their abusive mother, and working alongside closeted colleague Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr), Millie launches a hunt for a missing teenage girl, a case complicated by underworld people traffickers, the old-money elite and a parallel investigation by Joe Dempsie’s shifty Met detective.The premise grew from James’s conversations with his mother, one of Jamaica’s first female detectives. “Novel writing for me is a form of detective work,” he says. “You’re solving the mystery of why your characters are behaving the way they are. My mum also had to deal with a country letting go of empire — she was a cop when Jamaica was still a colony, literally the strong arm of the crown. As Jamaica had to redefine herself, so did she as a female cop in a country that was getting more and more volatile, while also having three kids. That juggling, code switching and politics-playing is reflected in the show.”Lawrance adds that this makes Millie unusually forthright. “Black characters in traditionally white spaces are usually not as direct as Millie,” she says. “She’s not a palatable character and doesn’t go out of her way to ingratiate herself, which makes her very empowering to play. Having a Caribbean author platform her is why she is so self-assured, in a way that characters I’ve seen written by people from the UK are not.”James, who won the 2015 Booker for his third novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, acknowledges the influence of hit American show True Detective and Nordic noir on his series which, like most of his novels, goes beyond the genre trope of the single narrator. “If you’re going to tell a story about Jamaica, you can’t use one voice,” he says. “It’s the biggest small country in the world — there are 15 different Jamaicas in one island.”While The Long Song and Three Little Birds both used the Dominican Republic to double for the island, Get Millie Black was shot in Jamaica for three months — longer than any international television production to date. This and the showcasing of a number of local household names lends the series a striking verisimilitude. The opportunity to smash a few lazy stereotypes was seized enthusiastically.“We can think of Jamaicans purely as Yardies [in the UK],” says German-Jamaican Annetta Laufer, one of the series’ directors. “They either do drugs or they’re incredibly poor. To see middle-class Jamaicans, white and black, with kids, houses and cars, just going to work, isn’t something we’re used to seeing. And what does a poor Jamaican look like, anyway? It’s not just about poverty. You’d expect the gullies [Kingston’s open storm-drains] to be the worst place on Earth, but the Sunlight Ladies have created a beautiful safe space there.”The Sunlight Ladies is the name given to the trans community in which Hibiscus has found shelter and solidarity, based on the real-life “Gully Queens”. The light cast on LGBT+ lives in Jamaica is one of the series’ most significant achievements. For James, who underwent religious rituals as a young man to “drive out the gay”, it has been a heartening experience. Lawrance says she was moved by her mother’s suggestion that the series could be “healing” for Jamaica — something she believes also applies to Mr Loverman. The BBC’s superb Bernardine Evaristo adaptation last year took Caribbean queerness into the 21st century diaspora.“People who haven’t been to Jamaica — or not for years — expect a Jamaica that doesn’t exist any more,” says James. “I used to mock that until I became that very person. For example, I was at a club with fully out trans women during the shoot. That would never have happened in 2007, when I left. Places change and grow when you’re not there. I liked this Jamaica, more than the one I left.”For Lawrance, who says she was raised “culturally Jamaican” in north London by a mother who arrived in the UK aged 17, it was a homecoming with its own revelations.“As a Londoner sometimes at odds with my British heritage, I’ve always wanted to come back to Jamaica,” she says. “That desire was consolidated by spending time there, but some of the fantasy was dispelled as well. This is a country ransacked by colonisation and there’s a lot of hardship . . . More generally, it’s struggling under the thumb of American colonialism these days — most people can’t leave without a US visa, because you have to go via Miami to get anywhere else in the Caribbean. Some people can only get visas through nepotism or if they’re of a certain class, so a lot of people are stuck and opportunities are limited.”The holy grail for broadcasters is the returning series. So, does British TV have the appetite to sustain these stories beyond a one-season splash? Lawrance counsels caution, noting the early cancellation of several series exploring new worlds with Black female leads — not just Three Little Birds, but also London-set shows such as Champion and Riches. “We see these waves of diverse shows a lot. Some of our popular channels like to have the appearance of variety, but the real support for the long-standing careers of Black writers, showrunners, producers, isn’t there. Get Millie Black has the potential to do more, but will it?”‘Get Millie Black’ is on Channel 4 in the UK from March 5 at 9pm and streaming on Max in the US Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
