Black Earth Rising

An intelligent script digs below the superficial understanding that some of us (including me) have of the dreadful events in Rwanda, while creating strong characters to drive forward a human story. The actors are more than up to the task of making this balance work. I am gripped and eagerly await episode 3.

I really enjoyed the show but had to laugh at the doctor's line in the first episode about white people finding it hard to tell African's faces apart. I laughed because Micheala Coel, whilst a great actress, has a face that is just so obviously from West African heritage and not Tutsi. Having lived and worked with Rwandans of many backgrounds over the years and knowing that people were killed in the genocide just because of how they looked it is hard to put this on one side.

I've never seen so many people vomit. Everybody vomits at one point or another in this show, for different reasons, constantly. Seriously, like, maybe 5 or 6 times. So, beware if you have hemetophobia.

A bit violent and slow, as only british shows can be, but interesting and intriguing. The main character does get on one's nerves, but the acting is good. And certain scenes (mostly the non-dialogue ones) drag on for far too long.

This series, frankly, left me changed in ways I don't fully understand yet - changed, I think, about human condition. John Goodman was as solid as John Goodman can get, but it is Michaela Coel's (Michaela Ewuraba Boakye-Collinson's) performance that is riveting! You are never shown the scenes of the genocide directly. They are creatively gentled in animation that tells the story without showing the story, and in aftermaths that drive home reality without a bloody middle. I was grateful for that. I love a good mystery and this has many!... And, I appreciate a deeper understanding of a history that seemed incomprehensible and far away at the time. Finally, I appreciated the complex view into the way in which White, Third World nations continue to profit from the mess we had a hand in both creating and in trying to repair. If you have a stomach for hope and despair, it doesn't get better than this.

Hugo Blick is arguably the most ambitious writer of television drama in Britain today, and he certainly restates his case with 'Black Earth Rising', his latest work, which is by turns brilliant, intelligent and maddening. The series touches upon an immensely difficult subject - the Rwandan genocide - and amazingly manages to give mass murder a delicate, nuanced treatment without hiding from the horror. The acting and direction are also first rate. And yet, I found the central character deeply unappealing (though impressively portrayed by Michaela Coel), a person who demands the right to set the terms of debate with an inner sense of absolute moral certainty. Blick's script allows for the fact that she might be a difficult person to be around; but not that she might be wrong. And if part of Blick's skill is to distill huge issues into personal dramas, there are perhaps unintended side effects, most obviously that the fate of a country seems to be in the hands of a handful of people, all of whom know each other extremely closely, but this goes uncommented upon. In some ways, these two issues coincide - that the good guys have the right to represent their nation is presented almost as a given. Yet while I can nitpick, it's a story that will remain in my mind long after countless police procedurals have been forgotten. It's worth your time.