by Remilekun Jordan.
The Nigerian audience isn’t unfamiliar with home-based young adult television. Shows like Need to know, Binta and friends and Shuga have lived on our screens for years now, and two of these shows, although long gone from the air, are still considered classics by those who can remember them. With Netflix’s new show Far from home – for a nanosecond there, it seemed like we had another supposed classic YA show, but all we got for most of the six episodes is a sequence of attempts held together by fantasy and a few fresh faces.
Produced by inkblot Productions, Far from home has a balanced mixture of stars and newcomers. We have the recognisable faces of Richard Mofe-Damijo, Bimbo Akintola, Funke Akindele, Adesua Etomi and some newcomers /next-gen talents like Genoveva Umeh, Olumide Owuru, Mike Afolarin and Elma Mbadiwe. The show primarily follows the story of a young indigenous artist Ishaya and how he navigates the highs and lows of adolescence and the perils of being a socio-economic pariah.
One could say it shares similarities with its foreign counterpart, the overstayed Elite or Blood & water (Both on Netflix) but what we have here is a parody – a binge-worthy parody. A parody isn’t inherently lacking in quality as long as it acknowledges it is a parody. It thus does not require a hyper-critical engagement alongside the entertainment it provides far from home wants you to engage with this story about heavy, sensitive subjects as it speeds past said subjects.
The character Ishaya (Mike Afolarin) is the nucleus of everything, but his background is somewhat rushed through in a bid to get to the affluence that the showrunners envisage the audience might be here for, but that hastiness contradicts whatever message is being passed across, through the utter foreignness of show’s ethos. The acting performances, although decent, do not make up for the show’s inconsistent pacing and binary take on wealth and the lack of it. Asides from Ishaya’s run-in with Government and Rambo, played by Bucci Franklin and Bolanle Ninalowo, the show has no real consequences or interesting characterisation even and unfortunately, when it tries to tackle the fallout of grief through Ishaya’s mother (Funke Akindele), it falls short.
The story itself is held together by a singular uninteresting character whose only one trick is steering up ways to make bad decisions, and whilst that isn’t a critique, it becomes a problem when the character lacks depth and, by extension, affects how we perceive the other characters. We have a self-centred main character who is too bland to be morally grey, too selfish to be ethically upright and too oppressed to be antagonistic, so he just floats.
The elephant in the room – relatability. Art doesn’t necessarily have to be relatable to be good, but Far from home is completely detached from the collective experience of Nigerian secondary schools, both public and private, on the extreme ends of the wealth gap.
Certain scenes across six episodes come off as the blaxploitation version of an original Disney movie with bits of derivative dialogue that come off as obnoxiously cute and progressively unnecessary. Aside from the suspension of belief and entertainment, we all turn to fiction to find a part of ourselves in stories, and it’s impossible to do that when you are presented with an animated version of a real person dealing with real-life issues.
The football match scene where towards the end of episode 3 had a cheer squad chanting- it’s not necessarily unusual to see that in a school like Wilmer Academy, but it’s easy to tell that it felt forced and came off as campy. That’s the summation of the majority of this show; campy. Campy isn’t necessarily terrible, but it makes subject matters that are meant to be taken seriously come off as inauthentic.
Conclusively, I do think the show has some redemptive qualities regardless of some of the performances. The cinematography is simple, but simple is good. Bucci Franklin stands out in his scenes – he does not overact, and yet he delivers a compelling performance that does not take itself too seriously. The initial worrying about the cast and their age held some validity, but all that disappears when you get used to seeing them in a school uniform, and they truthfully could have gone for a younger cast since it’s a PG-13 show.
The show will be memorable and will inevitably spark discourse and not because it has anything grand to offer in terms of storytelling but because it has a platform that propels it towards a starving audience. And if they do get renewed for a second season which I oddly hope they do, hopefully, the writers go back to the drawing board to salvage a story so far gone and write something for an audience closer to home.