Police procedurals are getting stale – Get Millie Black is a welcome change ...Middle East

Written by Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James, Channel 4’s new police procedural Get Millie Black is a welcome departure from both the genre’s tired tropes and the drizzly British skies they normally unfold beneath. Set in Kingston, Jamaica, the series follows Detective Millie-Jean Black (Tamara Lawrance) as she investigates missing person cases with her partner Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr). But as the first episode proves, Millie has plenty of her own issues to unravel too.

Sent to London by her abusive mother as a child, we meet Millie once she’s returned to Jamaica after her mum’s death. Desperate to reconnect with her beloved brother Orville, she finds her sibling has transitioned while she’d been away. Now Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen), Millie’s sister exists on the margins of society, selling sex and sleeping rough in one of the town’s open-air gullies. Millie – who regularly bribes guards to free Hibiscus from jail – wants the sisters to live together in their childhood home, but Hibiscus is less than keen. As Millie explains in a voiceover: “Mama’s ghost has kept Hibiscus out of here.”

A kind of omniscient narrator, commenting on proceedings with the benefit of hindsight and adding context, Get Millie Black’s voiceover offers an elegant bridge between its author’s literary pedigree and his new medium. “Like every story about this country, this is a ghost story,” Millie pronounces at the beginning of the first episode, framing the narrative from a historical angle as well as a personal one.

Millie is also busy with the case of 15-year-old Janet Fenton, last seen getting into a flashy car with an older white man. With her beau identified as local scion Freddy Somerville – “a rich boy who love f**king ghetto girls,” according to Curtis – he and Millie head to the Somerville family home, where Kingston’s race and class hierarchy is laid bare. “You trespassin’,” hisses Freddy’s father, having made it clear he could end Millie’s career with just one phone call. As her voiceover puts it: “Behind every old white family is the ghost of a slave.”

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Jamaica’s colonial past looms large in Get Millie Black, infusing social interactions with copious intersecting binaries: uptown and downtown, black and white, Patois and British English. While the story is shot through with identity politics, the drama’s exploration of those dynamics is largely unforced though pivotal to the plot.

Ex-Londoner Millie, for instance, frequently moves between languages depending on who she is talking to. Ducking into the Somervilles’ kitchen to speak to a reticent black housemaid, Millie slips into Patois and spits in the jug of lemonade the maid is preparing for her wealthy white employers. Her code-switching pays off – when the maid reveals that Janet was probably pregnant, Millie and Curtis find a potential motive. Could Freddy have done away with Janet to hide the evidence of their affair?

As the episode draws to a close, it approaches a dual crescendo. Hibiscus and her friends are chased by weapon-wielding thugs in a transphobic attack – a scene where she has to hide silently while hearing her friend be beaten to death is shattering. Meanwhile, Millie and Curtis track Janet to a Somerville property in the hills. No spoilers, but the mystery is only getting started.

While a line or two pushes the script into on the nose territory – “you here to colonise our case?” quips Millie to a white officer drafted in from Scotland Yard – James’ writing is overwhelmingly smart and surprising. Coupled with stellar performances, especially from Lawrance and McQueen, Get Millie Black is as far from the bog-standard police procedural as Jamaica’s Kingston is from London.

‘Get Millie Black’ continues tomorrow at 9pm on Channel 4

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