Black Earth Rising

If you’re hoping to be simultaneously challenged and made deeply anxious, look no further. And if the quest for rightness in a world that too often makes rightness impossible compels you, Black Earth Rising is well worth your time. Just give yourself something to grab, or touch, or press while you watch it. The steadiness will help.

Like David Simon, Blick is the kind of storyteller who's drawn to a form of bleak realism because that's where the tough stories that need to be told reside. In that sense, his work requires something of a commitment from viewers, but Black Earth Rising and Blick's previous work illustrate that it's one worth making.

The truth of Kate’s childhood isn’t as shocking as Black Earth Rising’s writers seem to believe it is. The series effectively defines both the real villains of its story and who Kate is, so much so that what she is, by the end, feels poignantly immaterial.

Black Earth Rising is overly confident in all the wrong places and lacks trust in all the right ones. The legal thriller’s frustrating bundle of potential never quite makes its case, despite the courage of its convictions.

Black Earth Rising’s focus on moving outward, on widening the scope of the investigations and recriminations to put the whole system on trial, is admirable, but in so doing, the series loses sight of its lead character. The story starts and ends with Kate, but after eight hours, we still have little sense of how she’s coping with survivor’s guilt, mental illness, navigating two cultures, or any of the fallout from challenging rich white men who live on estates with driveways the size of football fields.

Suspenseful but uneven drama. ... While the eight-part series deftly unpacks difficult questions about neocolonialism and the effect of geopolitics on the pursuit of justice, it’s less successful in forging a strong bond between viewers and the characters on screen.

[Black Earth Rising] squanders the audience’s goodwill with ill-conceived narrative turns, a reliance on cliché, and, worst, dialogue that defies belief. Its potential resonances as a story about how we metabolize, and prosecute, the worst of crimes ends up, soon enough, squandered as the audience loses faith in the story and its telling. ... Which raises questions about why Black Earth Rising exists at all, so inept is it at conveying the struggle at its center.