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It’s easy to see why Queenie, the heroine of the 2019 bestselling novel — now a new Channel 4 comedy drama — has been repeatedly called the “Black Bridget Jones”. Like Helen Fielding’s beloved bumbler, she’s a self-narrating, resolution-making, wine-guzzling young woman with a flair for faux-pas and very dubious taste in men.
Yet if Bridget was unlucky in love, she was also privileged in ways that mean her British-Jamaican counterpart “could never be [like her]” — as her creator, the author and showrunner Candice Carty-Williams, has noted. Where it’s an embarrassing costume that draws unwanted attention to Bridget at a posh garden party, for instance, in a similar setting Queenie, played by Dionne Brown, stands out simply because of the colour of her skin.
More than being a Gen-Z take on a familiar quarter-life-crisis story, this eight-part series is also a timely reflection on what it feels like to be routinely singled out, overlooked, patronised and denigrated as a young Black woman. And though Queenie’s tone generally remains light, there are pointed political observations and poignant reflections on everything from racist in-laws to fetish-fulfilling hookups, gentrified neighbourhoods to generational trauma, everyday microaggressions to domestic abuse.
Following a break-up that blindsides her, the 25-year-old Londoner begins a regimen of nightly boozing and (mostly bad) sex that soon takes its toll on her fledgling journalism career and her mental health. Despite being by no means the first screen heroine to seek refuge from existential angst at the bottom of a bottle or between a stranger’s sheets, Queenie is imbued with an engagingly individual presence by Brown. Her assurance in the role ensures that the character never seems passive or vulnerable, even when she’s at her most uncomfortable.
The poor choices, awkward encounters and mortifying scenarios sometimes feel contrived, though, and leave too little time for scenes that establish more meaningful events and relationships. Moments that look at the ties and tensions within her multigenerational family are some of the series’ most rewarding and richly emotive, and would be better served by more deliberate pacing and detailed storytelling. Like its protagonist, Queenie could benefit from slowing down.
★★★☆☆
Streaming on Channel 4 in the UK. Streaming on Hulu in the US from June 7