Get Millie Black: a gritty Jamaica-set police procedural

If you tune into this Caribbean-set detective mystery thinking it will be a glossy travelogue, along the lines of "Death in Paradise", "Get Millie Black" may come as a shock, said Carol Midgley in The Times.

Scripted by Booker Prize-winner Marlon James, this five-part Channel 4 drama contains some sunshine – "but the mood is never feelgood". We follow Kingston detective and former Met officer Millie-Jean Black (Tamara Lawrance), on a case that takes her deep "into the appalling world of trafficked workers and the even more appalling one of children being sold on the dark web". The drama packs more into the first 300 seconds "than some series manage in an hour-long episode".

At times, the story slips into familiar police procedural territory, said Hannah J. Davies in The Guardian, but it also touches on "discrimination against LGBTQ+ Jamaicans, police corruption, people-smuggling and the echoes of colonialism" in Jamaican society. Lawrance is superb, as are Chyna McQueen, as Millie's trans sex-worker sibling, and Gershwyn Eustache Jnr as her colleague, a gay man "in a nation still blighted by homophobia".

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There are a few lines that are "on the nose", said Emily Watkins in The i Paper. "You here to colonise our case?" Millie asks when a white Scotland Yard officer is drafted in. But the "identity politics" – while "pivotal" to the story – are "largely unforced". Overall, "Get Millie Black" is "a welcome departure from both the genre's tired tropes.