TV Drama Series Review Noughts and Crosses

TV Drama Series Review

Noughts and Crosses

6 Episodes

Showing weekly on BBC 1 and available in full now on BBC i player

Out to buy 13/4/20

Stars: Jack Rowan, Jonathan Ajayi, Luke Bailey, Kiké Brimah, Josh Dylan.

BBC television adaptation of the first book in the novel series of the same name by Malorie Blackman, who apparently was allowed to work closely with the adaptation

Other series based on other novels could be produced

Filming for the series began back in November 2018 in South Africa.

The series is speculative fiction set in an alternate history, where black "Cross" people rule over white "Noughts".
The BBC synopsis reads: "Against a background of prejudice, distrust and powerful rebellion mounting on the streets, a passionate romance builds between Sephy and Callum which will lead them both into terrible danger"

Any Good?

As you’d expect as is the norm these days very mixed response.
I picked out Two early extremes on IMDB which I’m sure will be echoed over the coming weeks and months.

IMDB 5.6/10

Incredible watch 10/10
Shannan kamalaneson on 5 March 2020
BBC have done an amazing job, this show is accurate to the books, well cast and detailed. It makes you feel uncomfortable, as it should and really highlights the issues that are reversed in our own world. Attention to detail from architecture to fashion to music is brilliant. Would definitly reccomend

Another horrific drama from the BBC...
Bunker geist on 5 March 2020
Another horrific drama from the BBC who despise the indigenous population and refuses to represent us. The conceit of this 'drama' that the UK is a colony of Africa is surely the ultimate fantasy for the elite who run the BBC. Better to watch Michael Caine in Zulu (1964) but the BBC don't show that kind of thing anymore as it doesn't fit their agenda. Where is the Lt Bromhead in this drama, ordering his men to 'fire when you see the whites of their eyes'?

MGN Review

An interesting concept and no doubt the BBC will come into criticism as they always do, justified well we’ll see

The critique always starts for me anyway not with the politics of their productions but with the actors. There are both familiar and not so in this and as ever a mix of acting quality and talent. Again though overall ok, some of the younger talent is not quite up to scratch but not a total disaster.

I don’t care particularly about the politics and Personally I don’t always agree with the way the BBC use my License fee, I just want to be drawn in to the story and entertained.

The series has a typical low budget feel to it. You are encouraged to make comparisons with Apartheid South Africa and other such states, but the threat to the British Government appears to be a few total nut jobs in a local pub. It just doesn’t create the atmosphere and the tension on a large scale and this sort of ruins the whole thing. Without reading the books the plot and story is something I’d expect to read from an online publication and not a commercially printed best seller??

The writer writes from her own racial experiences and adds a “Romeo & Juliet element, but the characters don’t quite work, the chemistry isn’t great. This lets it down, perhaps the books have more passion and depth, I would hope so anyway, but the writer was supposedly heavily involved

Helen Baxendale is one of the more experienced actors in the line-up but she doesn’t quite pull off her gritty character role and she like many others doesn’t quite sit right in the production

As a middle aged white guy I’m nor quite sure this drama achieves anything. It makes it’s point, but it is a point thats been made far more successfully and dramatically in many other superb film and dramatizations and really offers nothing new despite its attempts to do so by making it a paralell universe shift where Africa rules the globe. Yes the human race is flawed and at times just Evil no matter what the colour of our skin

Overall as entertainment it’s ok but it never really grips or grabs you by the throat and the gritty feel I should get from the subject matter never quite hits home for me anyway, and it feels more like one of BBC’s afternoon Drama’s which is not a bad thing normally but not for this type of drama.
Late on there is a ransom demand for £1m, that amount just about sums the whole series up just wish it had been done in an austin powers Dr Evil accent?

I am going to give it a watchable rating but it was all a bit formulaic and uninspiring which is a shame

MGN Rating Overall 6/10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTEJ4KJh4Ug