“This crime story is old, but people make it new.” So a voiceover tells us in HBO and Channel 4’s gritty new detective series Get Millie Black. It’s a line that serves as a neat distillation of the show itself. The familiar set-up — a disappeared girl, a tormented cop on her trail — yields something novel thanks to vivid, variegated characters.
An intricately woven human drama packaged as a knotty police thriller, the five-part series is Jamaican author Marlon James’s first foray into television. Like the writer’s 2015 Booker Prize-winner A Brief History of Seven Killings, the show is largely set in his native Kingston — depicted here with bracing honesty. The US-based James, who left the Jamaican capital many years ago, here tells the tale of a woman coming back to the city after more than two decades to find the ghosts of past traumas waiting for her.
Having been sent to London as a 12-year-old, detective Millie Black (Tamara Lawrance) makes the move after learning that her abusive mother has died — and that her supposedly long-dead brother is very much alive, now living as a transgender sex worker named Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen). Back in the house where she grew up, Millie is haunted by both what she endured and all that she missed. The joy of rediscovering her sibling is diminished by the sorrow of their inability to connect as the people they’ve become. Consumed by guilt, Millie vows to rescue her from poverty, failing to recognise that what Hibiscus wants is a sister, not a guardian angel.
This deep yearning to rectify the past also shapes Millie’s work. As a detective in the Jamaican Police Force — having been let go by London’s Met following a case gone wrong — she resolves not to let history repeat itself when a girl is reported missing. Throwing herself into the investigation, Millie soon draws a line from the teen from the Kingston ghetto to the son of one of Jamaica’s wealthiest white families. What initially seems a straightforward case of grooming and abduction is soon revealed to be part of a sprawling human trafficking conspiracy that reopens colonial-era wounds. As one character puts it: “The slave trade didn’t end. It just evolved.”
The transatlantic reach of the case soon finds Millie joined by Luke Holborn (Joe Dempsie), a senior detective from Scotland Yard who seems to know more than he’s letting on. The pair’s initial scepticism of one another gradually gives way to tentative understanding.
The investigation is compelling enough to sustain interest, but grows convoluted. Far more rewarding is James’s thoughtful interrogation of individual identity, family and contemporary Jamaican society. Each character, from Hibiscus to Millie’s colleague Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) — a gay detective forced to hide his sexuality — adds texture to this broader story.
But the series belongs to Lawrance, who announces herself here not with a showy performance, but with an introspection that subtly reveals the pain, vulnerability and conflict that the character holds within. In other words, she gets Millie Black.
★★★★☆
First two episodes on Channel 4 in the UK, March 5 and 6 at 9pm. On Max in the US