‘Queen Sugar’: A Thoughtful Nighttime Soap
Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network is making a move to become a place to go for handsomely produced nighttime soap operas, starting with Greenleaf, which recently ended its first season, and now Queen Sugar, which premieres on Tuesday night. Queen Sugar, based on a novel by Natalie Baszile, is co-created by Winfrey and director Ava DuVernay (Selma). It’s a great-looking show, and one that doles out its drama at a stately pace that is unusual at a time when Shonda Rhimes and Lee Daniels have amped up the pace of family-strife storytelling in shows such as Scandal and Empire.
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A death in the family is the catalyst for the action in Queen Sugar, bringing together three very different siblings to oversee an inherited sugar farm in rural Louisiana. There’s Nova Bordelon (True Blood’s Rutina Wesley), a combination investigative reporter and dabbler in the mystical arts. Her sister is Charley (Dawn-Lyen Gardner), a wealthy, fully-together L.A. woman whose basketball-star husband is caught up in a sex scandal. And there’s their brother, Ralph Angel (Kofi Siriboe), who’s got a criminal record and is raising his son as a single dad.
The siblings inherit an 800-acre sugar farm, but the initial episodes are primarily about family dynamics and how people can grow apart, yet remain united through genetics and how they were raised. The Bordelon family is a tight clan but each member has very strong, and very different, ideas about how the family should proceed. The show does a good job of distinguishing each of the main characters, but less of a good job in convincing us in other areas. For example: Nova’s newspaper editor expects her to drop her serious investigations into things like “lead in the water” to write a searing expose of her brother-in-law’s scandal — as if blood relations trump ethical conflicts.
Still, DuVernay keeps Queen Sugar looking beautiful, and there are moments of quiet contemplation, when characters are struggling with their opinions and emotions, that lend the show a certain gravity that is appealing.
Queen Sugar airs Tuesday nights at 10 p.m. on OWN.
