Queenie Isn’t Good, But I’m Glad It Exists

Mediocre Black Art Matters Too!

I like seeing new Black British art in the mainstream.

In the UK media landscape, when Black creativity isn’t being suppressed by risk-averse broadcasters, projects can find themselves starved of promotion even after being greenlit. For every Top Boy, Boarders, and I May Destroy You, there’s a Riches or a Timewasters, shows that didn’t benefit from high-profile talent, developing a surprise following, or Drake’s culture-vultration. So I’m always glad to see new Black British shows and films, even if they’re not great.

After all, white people have plenty of mediocre art, so why can’t we?

Anyway, on a completely unrelated note, I watched the new Queenie show.

It’s interesting, I read a lot of what’s called “Black chick-lit” (books written by and for Black women) which is why a few people suggested that I should give Candice Carty-Williams’ 2019 novel Queenie a read. They didn’t say why I should read it, they didn’t even say that I’d enjoy it - in fact, I specifically asked if I would enjoy it and I’ve seen less evasiveness in the Starmer vs Sunak debate - they just said I should read it. So I read it. And it was fine, slightly frustrating, but fine. No big complaints from me.

And then I was told that Queenie would be getting a television adaptation on Channel 4 and Hulu, and my reaction was

“Reeeeeally?”

Needless to say, Queenie didn’t strike me as the best material for a television adaptation, and I was still traumatized by Carty-Williams’ previous show, Champion, but I hoped to be proven wrong.

So let’s get into it. I’ll try to keep it relatively spoiler-free until the very end. There’s some bullsh*t I need to address at the very end.

The Black Bridget Jones

For the uninitiated, Queenie follows the misadventures of the titular Queenie Jenkins, a 25-year-old Black woman from South London whose life is constantly one more Jenga piece away from toppling. She’s in a job that doesn’t allow her to express her (slightly half-baked) political views, she’s haunted by childhood trauma that I won’t spoil, she discovers she’s had a m*scarriage without even realizing, and all she wants to do is go back to eboning-and-ivoring with her boyfriend Tom, who is a white.

I believe Queenie is meant to be a story about love and self-love, with a light garnishing of generational trauma and affirmation of identity. We see life kick the sh*t out of our protagonist, and it’s essentially a matter of how bad things can get before she finally decides to abandon this learned idea of strong Black womanhood (suffering in silence), seek help, love herself, and let others love her. I say “meant to be” because the big issue for me when reading the book was how it dedicated lots of time to showing Queenie’s journey to rock bottom, but not enough to show her working on herself and loving herself, it ends a bit pre-maturely.

This is partly why I think it’s kinda lazy to label Queenie as “the Black Bridget Jones” (I guess Frank is the show’s Mark Darcy? Ugh). I get it, both characters face rejection, singleness, body-shaming, and dissatisfaction with their careers in journalism; however, Bridget’s story focuses much more on the proactive steps she takes to change this while Queenie’s sees her do everything but change her life until the very end of the book.

There’s an interesting analysis to be made here of the differences between Bridget, a 34-year-old white woman in mid-90s Britain, and Queenie, a working-class Black millennial woman in post-crash Britain but I’ll leave that to someone smarter than me. Candice herself rejects these comparisons, seeing Queenie as much more political than Bridget (I mean… she’s definitely Blacker), but that rejection isn’t helped by the show copying Jones’ iconic bunny costume gag (without the humour).

Anyway, I bring up this comparison because I think it holds the key to why Queenie doesn’t work for me as a television adaptation. Namely, Queenie as a character and a story lacks the drive and direction of Bridget Jones, comparing the two is setting yourself up for disappointment. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Positives

To start with what I liked about the show, I think that Dionne Brown’s performance as the titular Queenie Jenkins was great. Queenie is a very difficult character to like at times, she’s the worst version of a 20-something; non-commital, obsessive, more than a bit self-absorbed, and infuriatingly self-sabotaging. She’s the kind of character that is always one shit decision away from earning my genuine sympathy, like Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems or Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City. Yet, despite all of this, Brown gives us a Queenie that’s a lot more charming, naturally funny, and likable than her book counterpart despite making a lot of the same missteps and struggling with some janky writing. Brown really sells the self-sabotaging uncertainty, anxiety, and insecurity that leads Queenie to make so many poor choices, but there’s a subtlety and a dynamism to her performance that makes me root for her more than I was expecting to.

The cast as a whole is really good. While many of my issues with Champion stem from its casting, overall the performances in Queenie are very strong. The highlights for me were Llewella Gideon, Joseph Marcell, and Michelle Greenidge who genuinely made me smile whenever they shared the screen as Queenie’s granny, grandfather, and auntie respectively. The brilliant comedic timing of the three made Queenie’s family scenes so fun to watch, and the actors’ experience and gravitas helped deliver some of the most effective scenes of the entire show. I also loved Bellah’s performance as Queenie’s best friend Kyazike, she brought the character’s boldness and fearlessness to life even better than I pictured it.

Some of the more dramatic scenes are effective, Queenie’s childhood trauma is handled with a good amount of subtlety (to a point), and I found myself getting fairly invested in the story surrounding her mother (played well by Ayesha Antoine). The flashback scenes are done well although what follows them slightly diminishes their effectiveness, and I was engaged when the show briefly touched upon the inherited elements of Queenie’s trauma that her grandparents needed to address for their own mental health.

Overall, the series is an upgrade on the source material in a few ways. Some changes are made to the end of the show that, while pretty awful, still give it more of a sense of resolution than what we got in the book. In the series, Queenie pretty much hits rock bottom at around episode 5, which leaves us with 3 episodes worth of healing for her to do. Now, does the show use these 3 episodes wisely? No. But it’s still somewhat of an upgrade.

Ummm what else…

The directing was pretty good, between this and Rye Lane (which you should watch), the South London propaganda is strong. There’s also some really great lighting, the scene in a roller rink was nicely lit.

Just nice to see Black creatives doing well.

Yeah that’s pretty much all I’ve got.

The Negatives

Starting with the most consistent issue, the writing in Queenie isn’t particularly strong.

Obviously props to Candice Carty-Williams for getting the adaptation made, but writing for the screen and writing for novels are very different prospects as J.K. Rowling would probably tell you (in between saying some TERF sh*t).

The trouble with navigating the change in format is most evident in the second most jarring aspect of the show: the narration.

There’s too much damn narration.

One of the core principles of any good piece of art is “show, don’t tell” and my goodness does Queenie love to tell us everything. The narration feels ham-fisted, it’s intrusive, and that’s a real shame because Dionne Brown is more than talented enough to convey Queenie’s thought process without the narration coming in to hit us over the head with it. By far the most engaging parts of the show are the moments when the actors are allowed to do their jobs, when the action is allowed to unfold and breathe, but these moments are then undercut by Queenie’s voice coming in to tell us things that often don’t even need to be said, often at oddly-chosen times. She even outright talks to herself out loud about the plot at times. It’s not great.

This same issue can be seen in the show’s clunky and overly-expositional dialogue where it sometimes feels like characters are just talking to the camera instead of talking to each other like people. It hampers core aspects of the show like Queenie’s relationship with Tom which we’re constantly told about but not shown enough to care for (the lack of chemistry doesn’t help either), and her therapy sessions. It’s not as bad or cartoonish as Champion, but still not great.

Another issue with the show stems from the source material, simply put; Queenie doesn’t really have much plot. Queenie’s day-to-day life isn’t eventful enough to lend itself to a full story structure, meaning that both the book and the show often feel meandering and repetitive at times. Rather than Bridget Jones’ Diary, I think a more informative project to compare Queenie to would be the HBO comedy Insecure. Insecure is also more character-focused than plot-focused, but when you get bored of Issa, the show has a larger world and two other main characters, Molly (you deserved better) and Lawrence (Tasha deserved better), whose individual journeys are equally, if not sometimes more entertaining than the protagonist’s. Queenie’s world is fairly small, we don’t see enough from the supporting characters outside of how they affect Queenie, because the book is about Queenie. There’s only so long we can watch her repeatedly make the worst decisions before we get a bit tired.

The show slightly improves upon the book in that more does happen in the final stretch of episodes; however, because we’ve spent so much time not doing much, many of the resolutions feel rushed and too many important character or plot moments are delivered through overly-expositional dialogue or contrivance.

Queenie herself is a bit of an issue too. Queenie is such a frustrating character because she’s incredibly passive; for the bulk of the book and show, the only times we see her actively follow through with her decisions are when those decisions are bad. It’s what I both like and really dislike about her, but it really doesn’t lend itself well to a television adaptation, despite Brown’s best efforts. In episode 7, Queenie describes herself as loud, brash, confrontational, and sassy and I can’t help but wish that we had seen this version of the character. Queenie’s only real confrontational moments come by accident when she insults Tom’s grandmother, and much much later in the show when she starts to assert herself more. It’s another case of being told that Queenie is too much but not being shown this more interesting side of her until the very end, maybe to avoid ruffling the audience’s feathers too much.

Speaking of the audience, Queenie’s approach to the titular character’s Blackness generally feels like it’s written for white viewers. There are some lovely moments like the multiple mentions of photographer Khadija Saye (R.I.P) but overall it just feels like the show only half-commits to exploring the more political side of the character. That is, until the penultimate episode where we get very jarringly written scenes of Queenie at a Black exhibition (I think in the book it’s an even more awkwardly-written chapter focusing on Queenie at a BLM march?) and an extremely expositional scene with her therapist. There are enough mentions of Blackness to satisfy white reviewers who can say it “deals with race” but it feels as half-baked as Queenie’s pitches to her boss (how funny that it came out just days after the similarly-half-baked Dot and Bubble episode of Doctor Who).

Lastly, I saved my biggest complaint until last just to avoid going into spoilers, but I need to address the biggest and worst change from the source material:

Frank.

The Frank subplot is bad. Very bad.

Perhaps Queenie’s Black love interest was a response to the character’s reputation for chasing white men, or perhaps they knew that the show would fare poorly on Black Twitter if all of Queenie’s love interests looked whiter than David Lammy’s dream dinner party. Either way what we’re given in the show is a forced romantic subplot where Queenie still spends 90% of the plot pining after white men while Frank pines after her, and when every other option is exhausted, Frank and Queenie end up together as a plane writes #BLACKLOVE in the sky above (and oh look, Tom is there).

I honestly would’ve been fine without Frank, despite my apathy towards swirl stories, I found the book to be a pretty scathing insight into how white men treat Black women, sure it was cringe, but it was interesting. However, in a show full of forced, rushed, and awkwardly written moments, you can almost see the writer’s room umm-ing and ah-ing over the Frank plot, deeming it necessary to avoid getting roasted but struggling to fully commit to it.

That’s probably the defining issue with Queenie as a whole. A bit like the character, it just rarely fully commits, whether that’s to the politics, the flat comedic set pieces, or the romance, the show feels like it lacks confidence and conviction, like it’s leaning too heavily on what came before out of fear of what the internet might think of it.

Despite the largely negative review however, I’m still glad that Queenie was made, I hope it does well enough to convince broadcasters to commission more Black media and give them similarly decent levels of promotion. However, I come away from Queenie feeling like it could’ve been so much more, and that’s a real shame.

Also f**k Dot and Bubble.