<em>Queen Sugar </em>Is the Most Luxurious Show on Television
In the Season 2 opener of the OWN drama Queen Sugar, a teenaged Micah West (played by Nicholas Ashe) is pulled over in his luxury sports car for what appears to be an instance of driving while Black. After he’s released into the custody of his parents, the estranged couple argues in the parking lot. Meanwhile, when Micah’s Aunt Nova (Rutina Wesley) comes to comfort him, she notices that the boy has urinated on himself. “Ain’t nothin’ to be ashamed of,” she tells him, embracing her nephew while discreetly tying her sweater around his soiled pants. It isn’t until Episode 8 of the season that viewers discover what really happened: A still-traumatized Micah tells his father that before going to the precinct, the police officer drove him to a dark alley. The officer put what turned out to be an unloaded gun in the boy’s mouth and pulled the trigger, informing Micah that he hates privileged, “fancy-talking niggers.”
“I think, for other shows, it would have been ‘a very special episode of about police aggression,’ returned for its seventh and , making it one of the longest-running Black family dramas in television history. Since the show’s 2016 debut, loyal viewers have followed the lives of siblings Nova, Charley, and Ralph Angel Bordelon—as well as their children; their Aunt Violet; and her husband, Hollywood—as they’ve fought to maintain ownership of their family’s 800-acre Louisiana sugar-cane farm. Over the show’s run, . They’ve also applauded DuVernay’s choice to hire an directorial team—several members of which had never before directed scripted TV—to help tell this story about race, class, and inheritance in the U.S. South. With its cinematic visuals and deep attention to the particularities of Black life, has reimagined what television about the American family can look like.
