Hulu’s wonderful new dramedy Queenie opens with an overhead, medium close-up shot that puts viewers face-to-face with the show’s namesake heroine. Twenty-five-year-old Queenie Jenkins is staring at the ceiling, her braids spread out on a white pillow, a tangle of necklaces grazing her clavicle, and an expression of idle bemusement twisting her features. In a voiceover, as the camera zooms out and we see that she’s in the midst of a gynecological exam, she enumerates the many “things I should’ve done today”—a bikini wax, for instance.
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It’s hard to imagine a more intimate introduction. And that’s fitting. Based on the celebrated 2019 novel of the same name and created by its author, Candice Carty-Williams, Queenie (streaming June 7) delves deep into the subjectivity of its title character, a Londoner of Jamaican descent who works in social media at a newspaper but dreams of earning a byline. While the pace of the eight-episode season is uneven, the show is comfortably conversational, often witty, and insightfully attuned to the frustrations of a smart, ambitious, young Black woman living in a racist world in a way that recalls Issa Rae’s Insecure. Dionne Brown, who had her first big role earlier this year, in Apple’s Criminal Record, gives a marvelously natural lead performance that honors the protagonist’s distress without negating her considerable charm.
When we meet Queenie, she’s in the early stages of what she identifies as a quarter-life crisis. At work, where her photo hangs in the lobby to advertise the paper’s diversity but the security guard still makes her dig out her badge every khbrknews she enters, her boss Gina (Sally Phillips) rejects her social-justice-minded pitches and urges her to “keep doing what you’re meant to be doing.” At home, she can’t stop arguing with her boyfriend of three years, Tom (Jon Pointing). Oh, and that doctor’s appointment? The upshot is that Queenie had a miscarriage, which has her…
