South Africa’s Blood & Water and Nigeria’s Far From Home are two Netflix shows with similar premises. Both bear similarities to the Spanish Netflix series Elite. In Elite, the children of the world’s richest and most powerful people attend the same high school, Las Encinas. So, too, it is in the fictional Wilmer Academy of Nigeria and Parkhurst High of South Africa. In all circumstances, our entry into these worlds is by way of an outsider who, in one way or another, infiltrates the garden of eden. In this way they have already established the protagonist(s) as the audience surrogate, or avatar, so to speak, and the gates are opened to us.
The two shows then diverge in drastic directions and genres. Far From Home is a coming-of-age crime thriller disguised as a YA school drama, while Blood & Water is an Agatha Christie-esque mystery (at least up until season two). Season three is really something else (in a good way) disguised as a YA drama. Holding up these two cards, one would expect the one with the crime label to be more thrilling, shocking, and exciting. In reality, Blood & Water contains the majority of those qualities.
Ordinary people like to leave their work in the office, head home to their rookery and cosy up to a six-episode fantasy of living it up in a mansion and attending the most exclusive and privileged college, or high school, or whatever. It’s only the upper class that imagines poverty to be entertaining. Sullivan’s Travels is what we’re living through, lessons filmmakers worldwide, not just in Africa, have forgotten. But clearly not everyone, if we were to go by these two shows. Blood & Water has been very successful in South Africa and Africa at large. Along the grapevine, I hear nothing but good things, and I decided to watch it after reviewing Far From Home to gain an interesting frame of comparison.
Far From Home is frankly disappointing. It is very unoriginal and very trite. For instance, when the protagonist loses his girlfriend to the mafia boss, I was piqued at how they would twist the classic Nollywood staple of the powerful, under-handed, conniving Jezebel and update her. They chose to stick to the previous darkness-of-the-template-soul and did not even bother explaining her further. Perhaps earlier generations, drunk on patriarchal propaganda, could accept a character like this at face value, but a lot of woke viewers would object to Gbubemi Ejeye as Adufe. She is the least thought-out character I have encountered on African Netflix, a walking shadow. This is emblematic of the show’s main problem – characterisation. The characters remain stereotypes from beginning to end.
Read our Far From Home Review Here.
Comparatively, Blood & Water has made their characters so vivid the plot could be a bonus. The whole mystery element, while being the show’s propulsion, could even be deemed irrelevant. The characters are so drawn out and personalised that the show could’ve worked as a hang-out thing. Every episode with a different storyline. It could’ve been that, but the mystery element does give it that long-form appeal. Unfortunately, it is also the sole derivative element in the show. The mystery genre hasn’t been very popular in mainstream media save for the occasional hit novels (which are usually unadaptable, in my opinion, if you don’t count Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl). And thus, audiences aren’t as conditioned to their tropes as, say, the rom-com or the crime flick, and it could be hard to pin down the feeling of familiarity, but it’s there. On this front, it lacks the Rian Johnson effect of Knives Out of genuinely surprising the audience with every double-triple-twist, even with a predictable genre. Blood & Water also leans on blood relation for pithy revelations and effects a la broken Star Wars, an over-plucked low-hanging fruit. Essentially, most of the time, we already know what’s happening before they tell us, but it’s what’s happening that we relish, not what’s happened after the fact.
How far into the world is the audience surrogate allowed? Well, at Blood & Water’s Parkhurst High, you gain full geographic knowledge of the school, which is crucial to a drama like this. The edge of the high school is the edge of the planet; this is the world as we know it, forty minutes at a time. By the time we get to episode six, Wilmer Academy is still a vague art-deco piece of architecture, and the only classroom we get familiar with is Ishaya’s art class. At Parkhurst, we know the Principal’s office (very well), the cafeteria, the janitor’s office, and the bathroom where Reece smokes and sells dope in; the world is developed. Very crucial. However, we shouldn’t be too hard on Far From Home, which seems to have obviously chewed up more than it can bankroll. Wilmer’s football pitch, for one, would be rejected even by a low-class football team. It’s not elite material. After that I couldn’t believe these people pay the school fees the show suggests they do.
Read our Blood & Water Review Here.
Blood & Water S1-3 and Far From Home S1 are available to stream on Netflix.
