The detail I keep coming back to in Get Millie Black is the direction of the journey. Millie-Jean Black leaves Scotland Yard and goes home to Jamaica. The story doesn’t send an outsider to Kingston to explain the place to us. It gives us a Jamaican detective who knows the city and still has things to learn about it. As a Jamaican author writing Caribbean characters of my own, I want more television built on that kind of confidence. Channel 4 press pack

Kingston is more than a location

Created by Jamaican novelist Marlon James and produced by Motive Pictures for HBO and Channel 4, the five-part drama follows Tamara Lawrance’s Millie as she investigates a missing-person case. The case gives the series its momentum, but the people around Millie are why the setting matters. Her relationship with her sister Hibiscus, played by Kingston actor Chyna McQueen, and her partnership with Curtis, played by Gershwyn Eustache Jnr, give the story different ways into the same city. McQueen has spoken about what it meant to see the lives of Jamaica’s gully queens given attention in the scripts. That’s a part of Jamaica international television rarely makes room for, let alone through a character with a family and a point of view. Channel 4 production announcement · Chyna McQueen interview

That’s what I want people commissioning the next show to take from it. You can sell viewers a mystery they recognise without sanding down the place or the people. And you can hire the people who know that place to do more than fill the background. Lawrance singled out the Jamaican crew and the range of people cast locally, from recent drama-school graduates to familiar faces from Jamaican TV. The post-production team also worked with a Kingston studio to record replacement dialogue for cast members based in Jamaica. These are concrete examples to point to the next time a production asks whether the work can be done there. Tamara Lawrance interview · Picture Shop production account

The next Jamaican series doesn’t have to be another crime drama

There’s an easy way to learn the wrong lesson here: take a good Jamaican crime series and commission only more Jamaican crime series. I’d love to see what the same trust in local writers and performers could do for a workplace comedy, a tender romance or a family drama where the struggle is over a business and what the next generation owes the people who built it. I write Caribbean characters because I want them to have that kind of range. A successful detective show should widen the list of things a commissioner can imagine, not become the new limit.

One commission should lead to another

An HBO and Channel 4 production can show what’s possible. It can’t replace the steady work of Caribbean broadcasters, producers and funders commissioning projects of their own. I’d start by paying a handful of Jamaican writing teams to develop pilots in different genres, pairing them with producers who can budget a short season, and bringing regional broadcasters into the room while scripts are still being written. Negotiate local broadcast and catch-up rights up front so viewers here don’t have to wait for a foreign platform. Keep track of who gets hired again, what viewers finish, and whether producers keep a stake in the work they create. An international partner can help reach more people without being the only one who decides what gets made.

I’m glad Get Millie Black exists. What I’d like even more is for the next Jamaican series to arrive without having to prove, all over again, that a Jamaican story can carry a television show.

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