Aight, so Episodes 13 to 18 aka the past two weeks of Showmax's The Wife have been filled with incidents; some exciting, some infuriating.
Which has made me wonder: is it a good move to have made the series into a telenovela or would it have done better as a 13-part series with four to five seasons?
Let's dig into these episodes and some of the issues and positives that have come out...
The series currently owns Thursdays on Twitter and over the past two weeks the story developed around the brother being robbed by Majola and them later burning down the Zulus' house.
This led the brothers to suspect Mqhele, who was in KZN, giving Hlomu hungry eyes as he gets beaten up by Hlomu's dad.
We got the final embarrassment of Sandile at Hlomu’s uMemulo, Hlomu’s dad disowning Hlomu and then jikijiki the eventual marriage of Hlomu and Mqhele in the space of six episodes, with no lobola negotiation or all the rights shown on screen nogal.
Now that’s a lot of things to happen in a short space of time and depending on what sort of person you are, this is a good or not-so-good thing for the series.
Some may say it’s a good thing because it means the series has pace, the story feels like it has a fast forward momentum and you're guaranteed of “something to happen” in each episode.
I’m of the latter opinion - that a fast pace does not always mean great drama because it's easy to sacrifice character moments, development and nuance with the preoccupation of moving on to the next beat quickly.
This brings me to the question of whether or not the telenovela format works for the series.
I was hoping the longer episodes count would mean we would get more character moments and enough space in between the big reveals so that the impact of those reveals have a context and therefore a greater resonance.
We, as the audience, would have a better understanding of what motivated them. We can also see the consequences of those actions before moving onto the next major incident.
But telenovela prioritises melodrama over dramatic tension, and unfortunately, instead of The Wife feeling like a drama series with lots of episodes, it's starting to feel like a typical melodrama with the shortcomings of melodrama aka another standard soap opera.
Some of the shortcomings of melodrama are creating sensation over drama, giving the audience something to shock them to talk about, even though the story has not done enough to earn the shock or drama.
This happens mostly through incidences that are quickly forgotten and never unpacked and we move onto the next shocking incident as if the one before never happened. Which, for some strange reason, the characters never truly learn or grow from.
With The Wife you have Hlomu being beaten up by Mqhele, then running home and in the same episode going back with the dude after her father disowns her.
Only for the episode to be followed by uMemulo, a coming of age ritual, done by parents for their child being a good child, but it's not explained what motivated the father to do this - when we last we saw him he had disowned Hlomu.
Hlomu's age and why the parents have chosen to do uMemulo now are elements that are never explained in the series.
Then, four episodes later, she’s getting married and by the same dude who beat her up and it's not even an issue. The only issue is that the guy is a criminal?? Not that he is a criminal, but he has also been violent towards her.
We are not given reasons at to why Hlomu feels so attached to Mqhele. What does she get from him that makes her risk it all for this man?
Also, Hlomu's dad has been okay with Langa, the gay brother, all along, but at the wedding, he is now embarrassed by him.
To point where Langa creates a scene, but this issue of the father-son relationship has never been touched on before. It's never been set up that there are issues in their relationship, and it comes up at the wedding to create sensation, which is not necessarily drama.
For drama to happen one needs to understand what’s at stake here, what’s motivating all this conflict but the series keeps undercutting that principle for the shock factor and will soon move along without even showcasing the after effects of the shock.
The Majola hijacks the Zulus, it's forgotten within two episodes and we move onto something else - the guys' house burns down and the elder brother gets burned whilst retrieving the money from house.
Next episode they have a flashy new house with flashy new cars and we never see the state of the house or how the entire family feels about it burning down nor what impact it has on their psyche as a family because we need to move on to uMemulo and wedding beats.
At the end of the day it feels like one is watching a series of events instead of characters going through situations that impact and change them, resulting in them growing and seeing things differently.
Don’t get me wrong, the casting is spot on, the world is super interesting, even the dynamics with the characters are interesting.
Although I’m starting to feel a shorter season may have forced the writing team to compress the story and would have made them more focused on allowing the characters to reveal the plot instead of the plot dictating what’s happening.
Between the pilot episode and Episode 18, where Hlomu finally discovers the truth about the Zulus, she’s had only about four episodes where she’s actually investigated the heist.
Although the series was set up as Hlomu, the journalist, being wooed by this taxi kingpin and his brothers without knowing that they're cash in transit heist masterminds.That's super dramatic but alas.
I do hope as the show continues, the writing team gives the characters space to breathe and reflect and to also reveal that there are consequences to their actions.
If that does not happen I’m afraid Hlomu may end up as yet another telenovela and not one of our great drama series that was able to highlight a particular world inhabited by particular characters.
I wish the writing did a better job of setting up characters and plot points so we could understand the context and motivation. This way the pay off is so much more meaningful than contrived sensationalism.
I've noticed the directing has gotten better from Episode 16, I shall hold out thumbs for the writing to improve too.
Rating
**1/2
Index
*crap **you are on your own ***it tries ****almost perfect *****Instant Classic