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Sometime during the first episode of Hulu‘s Black Cake, I found myself oohing and ahhing over a Newport Beach bungalow. “That’s a very nice house!” I wrote in my notes, because most of what critics jot down in their notebooks while watching things is not very clever. Then, a second later: “Honestly, too nice. Looks stage decorated.”
Because the set isn’t supposed to be just any old house but a home — one that’s sheltered a single family long enough to see its children grow up, move out, and come back again as adults in the aftermath of their mother’s passing. Yet despite the dozens of framed photos lining the hallways, the space seems too tasteful, too coherent, too clearly designed by professionals preparing a shoot rather than shaped over decades of evolving tastes, conflicting opinions, sentimental decisions.
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Black Cake
Cast: Mia Isaac, Adrienne Warren, Chipo Chung, Ashley Thomas, Lashay Anderson, Faith Alabi, Glynn Turman, Ahmed Elhah, Simon Wan, Sonita Henry
Creator: Marissa Jo Cerar; based on the novel by Charmaine Wilkerson
What the décor did reflect, it turned out, was the sensibility of the show as a whole. Black Cake, adapted from Charmaine Wilkerson’s lively best-seller, is broadly palatable: Its characters are easy to sympathize with, its ideas unimpeachably well-meaning, its settings and costumes painstakingly curated. But the impression it leaves is of a home that, pretty though it might be, feels like no one’s actually lived in it for a day.
Like Wilkerson’s novel, Marissa Jo Cerar’s miniseries is built around two pivotal deaths. In 1960s Jamaica, teen bride Covey (Mia Isaac) flees the wedding reception after the sudden collapse of her unwanted groom, a gangster named Little Man (Anthony Mark Barrow). In present-day California, Covey, now going by Eleanor (Chipo Chung), perishes of cancer. Before she goes, she leaves to her adult children, oceanographer Byron (Ashley Thompson) and artist Benny (Adrienne Warren), a trove of voice recordings promising to reveal the true history of their family. The eight hourlong episodes, seven of which were sent out for review, jump back and forth between past and present as Eleanor’s tender narration excavates the past she’d once planned to bury forever.
Black Cake‘s contemporary material is frustratingly weak. While there are flashes of poignancy in the estrangement between Byron and Benny, neither the workplace discrimination endured by Byron nor the domestic abuse suffered by Benny strays even an inch from textbook-standard beats. But for a while, the basic mystery of how Covey became Eleanor is reason enough to keep watching. Covey’s journey is undeniably a dramatic one, spanning decades and continents and swinging between unspeakable sorrow and indescribable joy, and Black Cake moves through it at a brisk and businesslike clip. By the end of the first hour, Covey’s Edenic childhood has given way to a nightmarish betrothal. By the end of the fourth, she’s escaped from Jamaica to London to Edinburgh and back to London.
Isaac’s versatile performance keeps us rooting for her every step of the way, as Covey transitions from the Disney-princess innocence of her teen years to the bone-deep misery of her 20s. Most of the characters Covey encounters in adulthood are flimsy paper dolls, constructed solely for the purpose of making a point about the society she’s in or reflecting her emotions back at her or moving her along to the next adventure. But some of the islanders who populate her youth leave a more lasting impression — like Gibbs (Ahmed Elhaj), the love interest who holds a gaze as tenderly as a Barry Jenkins hero, or Lin (Simon Wan), the father whose sincere affection for Covey is outweighed by his congenital fecklessness.
With all its shocking twists of fate, Black Cake could never be described as predictable. Yet it lacks a certain sense of surprise. Plot points and thematic concerns alike are painted with a broad brush, then circled again and triple-underlined for anyone who might still be confused. The blunt approach has its advantages. Though the series hits on heavy themes like abuse, racism and misogyny, it’s easy to digest. But it leaves precious little room for a viewer to consider what’s not being said, to ponder the nuances of a gnarly situation, to simply sit in the energy of a scene. When Lin walks his daughter down the aisle, there’s no time to take in the progression of shock and anguish playing across Wan’s face before Eleanor’s narration cuts in to comment on “the look when it finally hit my father what he had done: He had sold his little girl.”
That Black Cake is well-intentioned never seems in doubt; if anything, it’s so straightforward that there’s no risk of it tipping over into conflicted feelings or moral ambiguity. And its aims overall are worthy ones. The series reminds viewers of the history of oppression against women and people of color, tries to shine a light on the way those issues persist even now, and grounds these ideas in a family defined by their flawed but unshakable love for one another. It casts about for tales we’ve rarely seen on American television: How often do we see portrayals of the Chinese diaspora in the Caribbean, for instance, as Black Cake offers in one intriguing detour to Lin’s childhood?
It asks us to consider how all of us are products of the collision between personal choices and the relentless sweep of history — much in the way that the dessert that gives the story its title combines sugar from Asia and Africa with fruits from Europe and North America, recipes tweaked over generations of Caribbean families and passed across the diaspora. It’s the same empathetic approach to history that made Wilkerson’s novel such a singular treat. The onscreen translation, however, feels like the work of a less experienced chef trying to replicate a gourmet recipe. The nuances have been lost somehow, flattened into a dish that’s no less sweet — but far less satisfying for tasting so much less complex.
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