When Tom (Jon Pointing) dumps her at the premiere, Queenie (Dionne Brown) is surprised. So much so that it takes her hours to realize what has happened and weeks to realize that he won’t come back. But what doesn’t surprise her is his reasoning. “You’re overreacting, Queenie,” he sighs. “And here it is,” he thinks.
But if Tom doesn’t value her flaws and all, Queenie he does it very much. The most charming thing about Hulu’s half-hour drama is how much care and compassion it has for its protagonist, no matter how disastrous or self-destructive her choices become — or how uneven the narrative becomes at times.
Queenie
Conclusion
An endearing, messy portrait of an endearing, messy heroine.
Broadcast date: Friday, June 7 (Hulu)
To throw: Dionne Brown, Bellah, Samuel Adewunmi
Creator: Candice Carty-Williams
And things are moving rapid. Over the course of eight episodes, Queenie makes one rash decision after another as she tries to overcome heartbreak. He drinks too much to numb his feelings. She has a lot of disgusting, unsatisfying sex, most of it with guys she doesn’t particularly like. He is an unreliable employee, behind schedule and hungover from his social media job for a London newspaper, and often a bad friend, ignoring his buddies’ advice or shirking their plans. In Queenie’s darkest moments, she is haunted by fragmented memories of her estranged mother, which she represses by any means necessary, as if just thinking about her could infect Queenie with the same deficiencies that derailed her upbringing.
Queeniethe gift to her, and really to anyone who can relate to the hustle and bustle of being in your twenties and feeling lost, is to give her the space she needs to sort herself out. “Maybe this is the kind of thing I like?” – he wonders after an unexpectedly perverse encounter. That doesn’t seem to be the case, judging by the expression on his face that betrays more ambivalence than excitement. But creator Candice Carty-Williams understands that sometimes the only way for a girl to figure out what she wants does to get pleasure from what she doesn’t want – and that sometimes the only way to make her realize what she doesn’t want is to feel it a few times. Similarly, Queenie will, in due course, face her childhood trauma on her own terms, even if it’s obvious to us from the beginning that she’s dealing with it much less “properly” than she claims.
It’s strange, then, that as thoroughly as the show understands Queenie’s difficulties, it has difficulty articulating who she is beyond them. From moment to moment, the show errs on the side of over-explaining her thoughts, lines likely taken from Carty-Williams’ novel of the same name. “Physical touch is not one of my love languages,” he tells us unnecessarily, although we can already deduce a lot from the way he flinches from a affable hug from a loved one. But the show doesn’t give an overall picture of her character. When Queenie complains to her therapist that the world treats girls like she does – “noisy, brash, insolent, confrontational, mean” – it’s not obvious whether she’s describing how she sees herself, how she believes the world sees her as a black woman, or how we should see her all the time.
This identity crisis is also observable in Queeniehits the mood. Some of Queenie’s internal monologues are clearly comic in nature: “Isn’t it enough that she can see inside me? Does she also need to know about my day job?” – she wonders while the gynecologist tries to talk during a vaginal examination. And she can be irate with herself, as when she corrects her own declaration that her Modern Year’s resolution is: “fuck all men.” “Not literally,” he hastens to add; it means she’s done with them, not that she wants to fuck more of them.
But amid the generally stern, if not depressing, mood, the jokes die down without a splash. Although the source material was advertised as “Black Bridget Jones”, the series is too massive to evoke similar levity, despite obvious homages like the Playboy costume Queenie wears to the party.
If QueenieYet Queenie’s vision could be sharper, but it is touchingly resolute in her belief that she is worthy of love – ours, her own, her community’s. To do this, he surrounds her with warmth. Carty-Williams has a knack for building believable, close and comfortable relationships between characters: her teenage cousin Diana’s (Cristale De’Abreu) snarky comment is all we need to understand the sisterly bond between them, and her mischievous, understanding smile Childhood best friend Kyazike (Bellah) immediately describes their energetic.
And while Queenie Barely bothers to dwell on Tom’s attractiveness (to his detriment, by making the longing for him more theoretical than instinctive), he creates an entire romantic comedy fantasy based on the way Kyazike’s cousin, Frank ( Samuel Adewunmi) smiles at Queenie – delighted, shy and a little scared, as if the mere fact of her presence was a blessing. Because in Queeniethis is a tender view.