The week in TV: Get Millie Black; With Love, Meghan; A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story; Towards Zero
Get Millie Black (Channel 4) | channel4.comWith Love, Meghan (Netflix)A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story (ITV1) | itv.comTowards Zero (BBC One) | iPlayer
Well, here's something. New five-part Channel 4 detective drama Get Millie Black, mainly set in Kingston, Jamaica, is the first TV show created and written by Booker-winning Jamaican author Marlon James (A Brief History 0f Seven Killings), and its literary bent is evident from the off.
Each episode showcases the internal narrative of a different character. First, the titular heroine (Tamara Lawrance), a study in dualism, one moment speaking in measured English tones (Millie was sent to the UK in her teens), the next in fluent patois. Returning to work as a Kingston police detective after the death of her mother, she must deal with the rage of her transgender sister, Hibiscus (a raw debut from Chyna McQueen), and a case that takes in drugs, violence, homophobia, lingering colonialism, corruption and missing children.
This is a drama rich in complexities. In a virtuoso performance, Lawrance holds the centre as the bold, uncompromising Millie Black. White people barely feature, apart from Joe Dempsie's Scotland Yard detective, whom Black dismisses and teases ('He's only a white man, darling. All balls, no cock'). Pretty much every time you meet a new character, they come fully loaded with traits and backstory. When James set out to write this series, he really wrote it.
Kingston itself is presented as a volatile contradiction of staggering beauty (blue waters, sandy beaches), bleak reality (poverty, criminality, brutality) and vibrant culture (if you're interested, Get Millie Black's brilliant theme tune is Ring the Alarm by Shanique Marie). There are some energy dips and missteps, not least an untidy tangling of plotlines towards the end, but in the main it's an impressive and original screenplay from James and a star-making turn from Lawrance.
Meghan Markle's new eight-part lifestyle series, With Love, Meghan, landed on Netflix in a fragrant detonation of essential oils, edible flowers and homemade beeswax candles. In what may be the last chance for the Sussexes to hang on to their $100m Netflix deal, as well as a curtain-raiser on Meghan's Desperate Trad-Wife merch flogging via her new company, As Ever, the stage was set for lifestyle greatness. Or something.
Filmed in radiant Montecito, California, but not at the couple's actual home, the setup involves Meghan receiving different guests each episode (friends, chefs, etc). Thus positioned, she bestows her upcycled Martha Stewart hostess worldview (there's no royal gossip like there was in those documentaries) while wearing stealth-wealth clothes, serving mountainous platters of crudites and banging on about how everything is 'amazing!' and 'exciting!'
Despite being postponed from its original release date because of the California fires, with the outside world darkening by the moment and the bulk of Meghan's enthusiasms costing more than most weekly household budgets, With Love, Meghan is TV tone deafness in extremis. The format ('Guests stand at kitchen island making stilted small talk and praising Meghan') could also do with a rethink.
The first guest, a makeup artist called Daniel, obligingly turbo-gushes: 'Why does no one present peas like this? They're like little pearls.' However, the next guest, The Office's Mindy Kaling, addresses her hostess as 'Meghan Markle'. 'You know I'm Sussex now,' says the duchess a little sharply (does she give Kaling the stink eye?), quickly adding that it's her children's surname. It's so awful (and brilliant), I'm impressed that Netflix (and Meghan) didn't cut the scene.
Elsewhere, her cooking isn't at all bad, and she's not that stiff (she's not above day drinking cocktails with her guests). For some, With Love, Meghan may hit the spot as an escapist irony watch. Others may balk at the interminable lifestyle churn (homemade bath salts, herb picking with trugs). Harry is only briefly wheeled on at the end, like a confused child who's about to be put to bed.
A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story, a four-part drama by Kelly Jones, based on Carol Ann Lee's book A Fine Day for Hanging, marks 70 years since the 1955 execution of 28-year-old Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain.
Ellis, played by Lucy Boynton, never denied shooting her lover, racing car driver David Blakely (Laurie Davidson), but the drama addresses the myriad injustices of her case: Blakely's psychological and physical abuse (he punched Ellis in the stomach, making her miscarry); how the trial was 'rigged' to protect others (including a sleazy type played by Mark Stanley); the fact that Ellis's peroxide-blond hair, nonconformist ways and class ('common little tart') were as much in the dock as the single mum of two.
Initially, it's hard to warm to Boynton's chilly, unsympathetic Ellis, whose faux-clipped tones Blakely mocks ('What is your real voice?'). Ellis is too proud – and disturbed – to let her lawyer (Toby Jones) make a proper case for clemency until it's too late. Incidentally, Nigel Havers plays his real-life grandfather, Sir Cecil Havers, the judge who presided over the trial; upset by the death sentence, Havers wrote to the home secretary asking for a reprieve for Ellis, and after her death sent money for her son's upkeep every year.
A Cruel Love is marred by crass melodrama, including preparation for the hanging (dangling nooses et al), though arguably the barbarity of capital punishment should be shown. In later episodes, Boynton brings Ellis's humanity and vulnerability to the fore (sitting in her cell doing jigsaws; nervously eating her last breakfast) and it's very powerful.
Over on BBC One, Rachel Bennette's adaptation of Agatha Christie's Towards Zero kicked off. It's set at the windswept fictional Gull's Point, where Hollywood royalty Anjelica Huston camps it up as a wealthy aristo. Languishing in a vast posh bed, tinkling servant bells, she resembles a haughty pin cushion. Elsewhere, the cast includes Clarke Peters (The Wire) as a lawyer and Anjana Vasan (We Are Lady Parts) as a lady's companion, while Matthew Rhys plays a moody sleuth, staggering around clifftops, coat-tails flapping.
This three-parter is enjoyable enough (I'm always up for a Christie) but is too febrile, and at one point (spoiler alert) there are highly sexed-up shenanigans atop a staircase involving (don't look, Miss Marple!) heads up skirts. Whatever your thoughts on Agatha Christie, never mistake her for Bridgerton.
Star ratings (out of five)
Get Millie Black ★★★★With Love, Meghan ★★A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story ★★★Towards Zero ★★★
Pauline Boty: I Am the Sixties(BBC Four)
A poignant, revelatory documentary about the 1960s British artist Pauline Boty, who blazed a trail for feminist art and died of cancer at 28, refusing treatment while she was pregnant.
The Leopard(Netflix)
Intense Italian-language period drama based on Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa's 1958 novel, which also inspired Visconti's 1963 film, about Sicilian aristocrats in the 1860s.
Imagine: The Academy of Armando(BBC One)The Thick of It, The Day Today, Alan Partridge, Veep… an in-depth profile of the influential Scottish comedy writer-director Armando Iannucci. Interviewees include Chris Morris, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Peter Capaldi and Jesse Armstrong.
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