Black Brain Pictures, the guys behind City Sesla, Lockdown and Abo Mzala are behind the latest 4-part series to hit SABC 1: Side Dish, which premiered on the channel on Sunday (19 August) at 20h00.
It delivers on debauchery, sexiness, some slick editing and our favourite subject of all time - girls behaving badly....lets dig in...
Written by Tshenolo Mabale (Who also wrote an episode 1 of Emoyeni) and Mandla M (one of Black Brain's head honchos), the first episode set up the not-so-fantastic married foursome of Sli (Jo-anne Reyneke channeling her best raunchiest self - the archetypal slay queen), Amanda (Refilwe Madumo, the faithful wife married to a douchebag - the diamond in the rough), Joyce (Matshepo Maleme - the happily married mother of three - the faithful friend) and Phiwe (Thuso Mbedu, the nerdy young one who's just gotten engaged - the goody two-shoes.)
The foursome's girl-weekend of booze and being naughty goes horribly wrong when the married queen B brings a stud that isn't her husband to the retreat.
Unfortunately the stud has a massive appetite and ends up sleeping with Sli and Amanda in one night.
As usual, instead of the girls ganging up on the guy for sleeping with both of them the same night, the girls get into a catfight which ends with the young man ending up dead. This is where things get interesting.
Mandla and Tshenolo have to be commended because the body count keeps going up and the plot moves very quickly.
Mini-series work well when treated like a four-hour movie and Side Dish delivered on that. In one episode we got the character's arc set up and about three plot twists all under one hour, leaving us wishing it was next week Sunday already.
The actors are also Side Dish's greatest asset. Jo-anne Reyneke leads from the front with her Housewives of Joburg demenour and she sells it hard, whilst not over-shadowing her co-stars who do their best to bring the idiosyncratic characters to life.
If the characters were not flashy and entertaining enough, the series decided to have fun with montages, either to represent the boredom and mundanities of school life with ants marching in lines or to showcase sex by having animal planet montages of animals and insects doing the naughty, finished off with a champagne bottle popping... who said we can't do self reflixivity in SA?
Side Dish delivers and SABC 1 has really created competition for Mzansi and M-Net for the 8 pm slot.. can't wait to see what happens to the foursome once they are back from the retreat and having to live with killing not one but two men in one night. Yes, the episode was that hectic.
It felt like: Sex in the City meets the Real Housewives of Jozi with a tinge of Pretty Little Liars.
Review
*****
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* rubbish ** ja nee *** ya zamanyana ****Almost Pefect ***** PVR the other show and watch this