The unflustered audacity of the plot is just one of the elements that makes Queen Sugar a rare act of beauty and bravery on television. While it caters to the tropes and archetypes that television viewers want in addictive storylines, each episode is unquestionably cinematic in scope and execution as it weaves an enticing and unapologetically political narrative.

Queen Sugar does not occupy a soap opera's heightened reality, nor does it trade in clichés. Each detail--from Nova's impassioned, elegantly constructed arguments against mass incarceration to Ralph Angel's lack of concern that his son prefers Barbies to Transformers--feels carefully chosen to represent nothing more, or less, than people stumbling toward their best selves.