Queenie review: ‘Grittier, raunchier and more truthful than Bridget Jones ever was’

When the book came out in 2019, it was a sensation, selling 250,000 copies in the UK alone and drawing rave reviews from critics. It was described as “a Black Bridget Jones”, which seems like the kind of reductive label a white reviewer might slap on a work by a Black female writer, until you realise it was Carty-Williams who said it.

I haven’t read Queenie or the Bridget Jones books, but there are some surface similarities between the series and the film adaptations of Helen Fielding’s novels.

Both rely heavily on the protagonists’ inner monologue/narration — a device that always risks telling instead of showing. Both feature young women who are trying to find their place in the world, tend to drink a bit too much (well, a lot too much) and have a habit of careening into unwise relationships with men.

The biggest difference is that Queenie Jenkins, sparklingly played by Dionne Brown, is a 25-year-old British-Jamaican woman living in a multicultural south London light years away from the bizarrely snow-white one Bridget inhabits.

Queenie is grittier, raunchier, more truthful and concerned with bigger, meatier subjects than just its heroine’s romantic entanglements — although the pile-up of Queenie’s disastrous experiences with horrible men does play a significant part.

It has a lot to say about the everyday racism, including fetishising, endured by young Black women, about the gentrification that’s destroying long-established communities, and about the complications of being in an interracial relationship.

Later episodes delve into Queenie’s difficult relationship with her mother and her resultant feelings of abandonment.

Queenie - Official Trailer

We first meet Queenie as she’s going through the indignities of a gynaecological check-up, a scene that’s darkly funny — the nurse (Laura Whitmore) breezily examines Queenie’s internal bits like a mechanic checking out a faulty car engine — but also lands Queenie with some bad news.

Queenie straddles two cultures and feels increasingly adrift in both of them. Her family in Brixton are warm and loving, yet also overbearing — especially her astrology-obsessed Auntie Maggie (Michelle Greenidge), who tells her all her problems stem from being with “a Gemini boy”, which Queenie takes to mean “a white boy”.

Things haven’t been going well lately between Queenie and her boyfriend Tom (Jon Pointing). They get worse when he drags her along to a birthday party for his ghastly granny at the home of his equally ghastly parents.

‘It has a lot to say about the everyday racism endured by young Black women’

The granny is a casually racist old cow who witters on about how any kids the couple might have would be “half-caste”.

“Why is this family so against seasoning?” Queenie thinks to herself, before inadvertently blurting out that, with a bit of luck, Granny might be dead by the time a child comes along.

Queenie storms off, accidentally wrecking Granny’s birthday cake on the way out the door. “You’re too much, Queenie,” says Tom, who decides it would be a good idea for both of them to “take some space”.

The house they share is his, so she has to rent a damp, poky flat. It takes her a while to figure out that “take some space” means “we’re finished.”

Queenie, who has a job at a magazine, also has to put up with racist micro-aggression in the workplace. Her condescending boss Gina (Sally Phillips, all charm and smarm) is happy to use Queenie’s photograph on posters to demonstrate the company’s policy on diversity, but has no interest in her story ideas.

All this sends Queenie plunging headlong into the grubby sexual encounters. Her first drunken tryst after a party is with a creep she’s found on a dating site, who calls his penis “the Destroyer”.

Featuring charming performances by singer-songwriter Bellah (her acting debut) as Queenie’s best friend Kyazike and Samuel Adewunmi as her cousin Frank, Queenie is engaging.

But there have been so many powerful dramas about the Black British experience in the five years since the book came out, it can’t help seeming a little ordinary.

All episodes now streaming on channel4.com