Black Cake

The story takes its time and the eight hour-long episodes require patience and focus, but the payoff is worth it. Black Cake is a highly intelligent and skilfully crafted piece that deserves to be slowly and thoughtfully savoured.

Black Cake isn’t perfect, but it comes together beautifully.

Still, even in unpacking Byron and Benny’s frustrating decisions, “Black Cake” beautifully illustrates how one woman’s secrets and choices can reverberate across time, even altering the lives of those who seemingly had no connection to Covey or Eleanor.

There’s deliciousness to be found in the specificity of Black Cake’s story, in being submerged in its island flavors and cultural complexities. (Speaking of, the costumes and production design are beautifully crafted, smoothly transporting viewers between decades and continents.) With an ocean’s worth of possibilities, however, we just wish it plumbed deeper.

Adapting an acclaimed novel that earned praise from, among others, Barack Obama, Black Cake serves up a sizable slice of period drama, deflated somewhat by the central character’s less-interesting children. The mix of soap-opera elements and mystery still makes this Hulu production enticing, but not as unreservedly as it could and perhaps should be.

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.

Attempts at contemporary resonance are clumsy. Police racism is crowbarred in. Cultural appropriation and cancel culture are earnestly discussed at dinner parties. Characters use phrases such as “internet discourse” with a straight face.