These Noughts + Crosses characters don’t yet have complexity and nuance to match its world-building. At this stage, it is difficult to imagine audience interest in Callum and Sephy sustaining the show into a proposed subsequent series. Even so, this is vital viewing.

Noughts + Crosses has its issues, but the cast is compelling to watch and we hope that some of its obviousness will get smoothed out as we get more into the actual story.

Although Noughts + Crosses is an imperfect series, it features some compelling performances, particularly from Rowan, Joseph, and Baxendale. (Fans of the British rapper Stormzy will appreciate his small role in the show as well.) In the end, the acting saves the series from a romance that’s initially undercooked and a race-reversal narrative that could do more to complicate its alternate universe.

Blackman’s story carries a potent message about representation and power structures, so it’s a shame that the dramatised version doesn’t always trust viewers to comprehend it.

“Noughts + Crosses” should be a far more uncomfortable, necessary watch in uncertain times of peak racial and social unrest. It’s clearly striving for that, but it isn’t as radical as it could be.

No matter how impressed I might be with some of the big ideas floated in Noughts + Crosses, I can't get past the feeling that the series is trying to do two touchy and complicated things — speculative-fiction world-building and love-story heart-tugging — and isn't wholly (or in some cases even partially) successful at either.