'The Other Black Girl' Disappoints As Horror But That Doesn't Make It Bad

By Jen Maravegias | TV | October 10, 2023 |

By Jen Maravegias | TV | October 10, 2023 |

As streaming services and CTV continue their descent into reinventing cable, what I really need them to do is create a unified, platform-agnostic dashboard that reminds you what shows you’ve been watching either via on-screen popup or email reminder. I started watching The Other Black Girl about a month ago, not long after it became available on Hulu. I got about halfway through the series, and then I got distracted by all sorts of things and finally finished it this past weekend. I enjoyed the first half of the show, and I wouldn’t have let it sit so long if only I had remembered that I had been watching it in between all of the other things that have been going on in my life.

First, the really good part about Hulu’s The Other Black Girl is the performances. Sinclair Daniel (Insidious: The Red Door) and Ashleigh Murray (Riverdale) are outstanding as the leads and foils in this 10 episode series. Sinclair Daniel has strong comic timing that she serves with the side of sarcasm necessary to confront the tokenism her character, Nella Rogers, experiences in the workplace. As Hazel-May McCall, Ashleigh Murray flips so easily between sweet, supportive ally and conniving accomplice to … well, whatever is going on here that she makes this level of duplicity seem easy.

In a supporting role that rivals her performance in Survival Of The Thickest Garcelle Beauvais uses her intimidating beauty and grace as a convincing mask to hide the true nature of her character’s motives. And Brittany Adebumola shines as Nella’s supportive but antagonistic best friend.

But the story never lives up to the sinister promises of the promos. I’ve seen The Other Black Girl compared to Get Out. But the theme of Jordan Peele’s debut as a writer/director was much more focused and felt more intentional than this series. Co-creators Zakiya Dalila Harris, the author who wrote the book it’s based on, and Rashida Jones try to split the difference between telling a horror story grounded in the reality of corporate misogynoir and a horror story about otherworldly methods of mind control. They miss the mark on both. It starts off strong in the first category. If they had stuck to a premise about tokenism creating a false sense of scarcity and competition, pitting people who would otherwise be allies against each other, I think it would have been incredibly compelling. But the show is built around a conspiracy that is more Stepford Wives as a solution to racism than Get Out. It’s strongly hinted at for eight episodes and isn’t ever properly explained. Even when the final episodes are dedicated to showing us its origins.

The denouement feels rushed, jammed into those final two thirty-minute episodes. The resolution is incomplete, leaving it open-ended in hopes of a second season that is not a sure thing. The story would have been better served if had spent less time showing us Nella reacting to ambiguously scary circumstances and more time explaining what Nella was supposed to be afraid of. If nothing else, the show made me want to read the book, along with all of the other books that have been adapted into screen projects I’ve enjoyed over the last few years. So, it wasn’t a complete waste of time. If it had fully committed to telling a capital-H Horror story instead of threading the needle the way they did, I think it would have been more successful.

All episodes of The Other Black Girl are now available to stream on Hulu.