My Number One New Favorite Show

After the disappointing season finale of Big Love (okay, so maybe Joey killed Roman Grant, but other than that, it just fell flat), I was wondering what I would do with my Sunday nights. But then, along came HBO's new series, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. I didn't read the books (mostly because I never thought it looked interesting), but following the 2-hour season premier, I am hooked.

In Botswana, where a woman is still culturally insignificant without a man, Precious Ramotswe (American actress Jill Scott) has divorced her abusive husband following a beating so bad she lost a baby. Her father has recently passed away, leaving her a very wealthy woman--in terms of having a lot of cattle. So she sells off some of her cattle and opens her own detective agency.

A woman can't do it all on her own. She hires a quirky, high-strung, totally OCD secretary, Grace Makutsi (Anika Noni Rose, the other girl from Dreamgirls), whose business sense may keep them afloat, even when her weirdo outbursts threaten to scare the clients away. She is also befriended by BK (Desmond Dube) and the local mechanic who is carrying a brightly burning torch for her, JLB Matekoni (Lucian Msamati).

In the first episode, she takes on two cases, that of a woman who suspects her husband of cheating and of a man who thinks one of his employees has filed a false insurance claim against him. She solves both cases, but both of them have a little twist. She proves the woman's husband is cheating by letting him come home from a bar with her and taking photos of them, but the woman refuses to believe he cheats, instead calling Precious a slut who seduced her husband. The man who is scamming his employer is actually a habitual insurance defrauder, but he donates all his winnings to a school for orphans.

She also investigates a witchdoctor's bag JLB finds in a very important person's car, and, in trying to locate the witchdoctor, finds a missing child the nation has been looking for. I think this is a really important element of the program; it shows how Botswana is both becoming modernized and developed and hanging on to its tribal and superstitious traditions. Both worlds exist in the same space, which is leading to corruption, kidnapping and other unseemly practices.

I'm excited to see more of this show. I have a real interest in Africa, in terms of the cultures that exist there and how they're represented on television and in books and films. Who knows, maybe I'll even read the books!