Adjani Salmon

Kwabena has films he wants to make and a working day to get through. In Dreaming Whilst Black (2021), Adjani Salmon makes both concerns matter, allowing his ambition to seem serious without treating everyone around him as an obstruction. We laughed at the workplace slights, then felt cross on his behalf because earning a living meant having to put up with them. Salmon's charm helps, but he does not use it to suggest that any of this is easy.

The programme he co-created began as a web series in 2018, became a television pilot in 2021 and reached a full series in 2023. A second series followed in 2025, taking Kwabena into the industry proper. Its fantasy sequences let Kwabena express thoughts and ambitions he does not say aloud. That gives Salmon more to play than patient endurance, though the ordinary pressures of work and money remain what makes the character easy to care about.

Salmon shares the writing with Ali Hughes, Yemi Oyefuwa and Thara Popoola, and their attention to funding worries keeps the struggle to make films concrete. He is especially appealing when the romance gives Kwabena something to care about besides his next professional opportunity. We are happy to stay in those scenes because the chemistry makes the relationship worth watching in its own right. Giving the other characters concerns of their own also helps him: his ambitions need not supply every scene's subject.

The limitation is clearer in the writing than in the performance. Some of the industry jokes merely point out a problem that the programme has already made plain, and charm cannot make those observations fresh. Yet Salmon keeps Kwabena's frustration understandable without requiring us to spend the entire evening agreeing with him. Start with Dreaming Whilst Black for the performance and the romance, and forgive the occasional obvious target.