Series Review: Blood & Water

You have probably seen a show like this a million times but just not in an African setting with predominantly African High School teenagers going through the boisterous motions of their teenage years with a bit of whodunnit thrown into the mix.

But these are not your typical African teenagers. They are a rainbow coalition of post-apartheid South Africa reflecting its diverse racial and socio-economic realities going through the motions of the universal playbook of teenage high school existential drama.

On the 17th birthday of her missing sister who had been mysteriously abducted shortly after birth, events of the day culminate in a teenager suspecting she may have discovered said missing sister, and is propelled to commence a discrete investigation.

Starting as a slow burner, Blood & Water ensnares you into its world with the allure of the trysts and shenanigans of hormonal teenagers tempered occasionally with adult themes of marital and parental challenges.

Its storyline harbours no pretentious complexities but between the sincerity of the performances of its characters and the brilliance of its cinematography, you are persuaded to forgive the implausibility and plot holes in its script/storyline and some of the gratuitousness of its sex scenes.

Speaking of sex, Blood & Water, like a rebellious teenager, boldly explores sexuality with strokes that are both audacious (and bound to ruffle Africa’s pretentious moral police) and beyond the thrust game of a teenager fumbling to get his freak on for the first time.

So, for the pretentious self-righteous viewer, I would have said skip this series but if we are being honest, we both know you will still watch it with the sneer of voyeuristic curiosity and afterwards come online to bitch and moan about how it erodes African moral values.

Although its title derivative (blood is thicker than water) suggests that it should be more about pursuing the narrative of the abduction crime at the heart of its storyline, as the show progresses, it sometimes appears to lose the scent of its trail and seems to be more who-is-doing-who and less whodunit. But that notwithstanding, Blood & Water succeeds for the most part, and enjoyably so.7/10