SummaryQueen Sono (Pearl Thusi), a spy with the secret Special Operations Group (SOG) looks into the assassination of her mother, a revolutionary leader, in this South African spy thriller created by Kagiso Lediga.
SummaryQueen Sono (Pearl Thusi), a spy with the secret Special Operations Group (SOG) looks into the assassination of her mother, a revolutionary leader, in this South African spy thriller created by Kagiso Lediga.
Queen Sono is thrilling and fun to watch, and while there are plenty of classic spy tropes to keep it firmly planted in the genre, it’s absolutely unique in its focus. With gorgeous costuming and a colorful soundtrack, there’s little the show gets wrong. Queen Sono makes sure to grab your attention and never lets go.
You could just watch Queen Sono as a standard piece of spy TV and there's fun to be had in that experience, but ... this is a far more complicated and immediate perspective than the one ever attempted by that Jennifer Garner favorite. Maybe Queen Sono isn't always exciting, but it's sometimes provocative in very real ways.
Between the speeches about colonial legacies and about historical atonement, there are plenty of throwdowns and chases and shootouts, staged with competence if not much flair. They tend to show up arbitrarily, on what feels like someone’s idea of an action-show timetable. When it’s time for a fight, there’s a fight. The pleasures of “Queen Sono” come outside of the action and the highly basic presentations of espionage and police work. They’re in the generally engaging performances.
Series creator, writer, and director Kagiso Lediga will need to up the ante with his script, and, like his main character, take some risks, so that it’s less of a derivative of an American procedural peppered with “Africanisms,” and is instead unapologetically African. So consider “Queen Sono” version 1.0 of Netflix’s African Originals.