Zakiya Dalila Harris and Rashida Jones’s adaptation of Harris’s novel is sharp and funny about being the only Black assistant in a white publishing house, and Sinclair Daniel is a find. The thriller underneath is foggy, and ten episodes is more than it needs.
Zakiya Dalila Harris published The Other Black Girl as a novel in 2021, and she has adapted it for television with Rashida Jones as a workplace comedy that keeps turning into a paranoid thriller and back again. Nella (Sinclair Daniel) has been an editorial assistant at Wagner Books for two years, the only Black person on her floor, and she has learned to smile through a great deal. Then a second Black assistant, Hazel (Ashleigh Murray), is hired, and Nella’s relief lasts about a day. The series is decent and often very funny. It is better at the office than at the conspiracy, and the conspiracy is what it has been building towards.
Daniel is the reason to watch. She plays Nella as someone who has swallowed so many reactions that her face has a half-second delay on it, and she is funniest in meetings, where we can see her decide whether to say the thing and then say it anyway. The scene in which she tells a white star author that his new book’s Black character is a stereotype made us laugh out loud and then wince, because the camera stays on her as the meeting goes quiet and every white face turns to see how she will take being wrong. Earlier, when Hazel is walked round the office on her first morning and every colleague lights up, Daniel does nothing at all, and the two lonely years before this arrive in one shot.
Murray is good too, and the show’s best trick is that Hazel works as both friend and threat. She wears her locs with pride, speaks to Vera Parini (Bellamy Young) as an equal, gets a column written about the firm’s new diversity, and is simply better at the game than Nella has ever let herself be. Murray plays her warmly enough that we kept changing our minds about her, which is exactly what the series wants. Brittany Adebumola, as Malaika, is the sceptical friend who says what we are thinking, and she is sharp, though the writing uses her mostly as somewhere for Nella to think aloud.
Mariama Diallo, who directs, keeps the Wagner offices bright and over-lit, all glass walls and white desks, so that nobody can be alone and nobody is ever quite looked at. Eric McCormack’s Richard Wagner, the founder, glides through it being avuncular. Young’s Vera is the sharper creation: a boss who praises Nella’s instincts and then overrules every one of them, and whose smile we found more unsettling than anything the thriller plot produces. EmmoLei Sankofa’s score helps here, dropping a low string note under ordinary office chat so that a compliment lands like a warning. The satire of publishing is specific and well observed, from the panel on diversity to the way the word ‘fit’ is used.
The trouble is the other series running underneath. The notes on Nella’s desk, the hints about hair, a history that seems to stretch back decades: all of this is dealt out slowly for several episodes and then explained in a hurry, and we will not describe where it goes. What we can say is that the explanation is less frightening than the hints were, and that the tone wobbles badly once the show has to stage its horror rather than suggest it. Ten episodes is too many. Hunter Parrish’s Owen, Nella’s well-meaning white boyfriend, gets scenes that exist to fill time, and Garcelle Beauvais, as a novelist Nella has idolised since she was a girl, is given a strand that promises more than it delivers.
The comparison nobody can avoid is Get Out, and the series knows it. It is working the same ground, the horror of being welcomed, and it is honest about the debt. But Get Out explained its mechanism once, cleanly, in under two hours. This takes ten episodes to get there and is vaguer when it arrives.
All ten episodes landed together on 13 September 2023, and we would not advise taking them that way. Watch the first three. If Daniel has you by then, stay for her, and treat the thriller as weather. If it is the notes on the desk you are waiting for, you will be waiting longer than the show can justify.
