Queen Sugar

There are moments where Sugar's twists are too easily spotted, but there are far more times when the show, and the spirit, soar.

[Ava DuVerna has] figured out how to turn a quiet, emotional story about a black family in flux into one of the year’s most beautiful and challenging series, one that suggests black America’s best days may still be ahead of it.

Queen Sugar feels like a show built to last--albeit the sort that will frequently inspire its viewers to get choked up, shake their fists at the sky, and wonder why they keep letting Ava DuVernay and friends so expertly control their emotions like this.

Queen Sugar takes its sweet time moving through a moment, lingering where other series tend to sprint, and it is generous with its searching close-ups of faces and hands and its images of the Louisiana countryside at dawn and dusk, an enchanted-seeming landscape of furrowed fields and gnarled, kudzu-covered trees. At its most navel-gazing, the show feels like Parenthood by way of Eugene O'Neill. But tell me you don't want to watch something like that.

Queen Sugar, which was created by “Selma” director Ava DuVernay based on Natalie Baszile’s novel, is a different kind of soap, one that moves slowly through each plot point and adds artistic and intimate flourishes whenever possible.

A languidly-paced hour that ultimately comes together in a satisfying manner. But have patience because it takes a while to get there.

From the opening scene on, the “Selma” director lends her creative strengths to the story, saturating every scene with the sumptuous visuals afforded by the story’s Louisiana setting.

Created by Ava DuVernay, Queen Sugar is an intelligent and atmospheric family drama about the Louisiana Bordelon family.

The show’s depiction of loss feels universal, but at the heart of Queen Sugar is a rich and powerful portrait of a black American family.

There’s a potent anger within the luminous world that DuVernay has created here, and yet the series moves with a grace that is unique to its creators’ empathy, curiosity, and devastating intellect.

With DuVernay leading the charge, Queen Sugar boasts a promising cast, heavily populated by black actors in their first series-regular roles, and an all-female directing team, some established but many still launching their careers--meaningful footnotes to the quality of the show, which is high.

There is a lot to admire about Queen Sugar. But the premiere, which airs without commercials, is as slow as, well, molasses.

The acting ranges from intensely solid to intensely shallow, and the dialogue is often cliché and tinny. But the characters resonate, and DuVernay finds scenarios and images that suffuse the show with exceptional emotional power.

Good newcomer, good cast and star showrunner. What’s missing, at least in the early episodes, is a propulsive story and pace to match.

It could all be so cheesy, but somehow it’s not. Credit DuVernay for giving us a sense of Louisiana--and black--life that rises above mere plot manipulations. You believe these people; you care for them. And that’s sweet enough.

Although Queen Sugar looks beautiful and introduces some great characters--including the Bordelon siblings' Aunt Violet (Tina Lifford, Scandal) and her much younger boyfriend, Hollywood (Omar J. Dorsey, Ray Donovan)--the three episodes made available to critics are scene-setters. The seeds for good drama (or at least quality soap) are there. We'll just have to see what grows.

The pacing seems, at times, at odds with the narrative’s overabundance of conflict. Universally fine performances keep the Job-like series of events from overwhelming things, but DuVernay is so focused on her main characters that the secondary narratives, including lovely scenes between Ernest’s sister Violet (Tina Lifford) and her husband, Hollywood (Omar J. Dorsey), often feel like afterthoughts. ... Even with these distractions, Queen Sugar is an undeniably beautiful series.

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.

Queen Sugar is deliberately paced--almost annoyingly so at times--and the opening scenes of Tuesday's pilot episode have a disjointed feel to them. But the show eventually finds its footing and packs an emotional wallop as you get to know and care for its characters.

After three episodes of Queen Sugar, there’s an overriding sense that the show has yet to take off in a big way, and doesn’t show signs that it will for at least a few more episodes, but it most definitely has potential to be a big winner when and if it finds its rhythm.

This grab-bag approach has certainly worked well enough for other prime-time soap operas, and it will no doubt find an audience here, but the strands interweave awkwardly in the early going. Some genuinely lazy scene-making saps the show of credibility.

Though the glacial pace is more akin to molasses, and the plotting offers few surprises in the first three episodes, there's a powerful contrast between these untended fields and the glittery L.A. skylines visible from the swank home of Charley. [5-18 Sep 2016, p.23]

It’s certainly energetic TV, but requires a strenuous suspension of disbelief.