[blockquote align=”centre” author=”EfikoScore: 5.8/10″ style=”font-size: 30px”] Nollywood’s young actors and actresses lend this Netflix show its main appeal. [/blockquote]
Netflix’s Nollywood series “Far From Home” is indeed far from home, home being the economically challenging country many Nigerians live in. Mostly set in the fictional affluent private school Wilmer Academy, this five-part young adult series teems with upper-class characters speaking with swanky American accents and flaunting their non-Nigerian names: Carmen, Atlas, Reggie, Frank, and Zina. Nomenclature works as a class shibboleth, or so it seems in the universe created by Chinaza Onuzo and Dami Elebe.
Meanwhile, Ishaya Bello (Mike Afolarin), this series’ central character who bears a Nigerian name, embodies the Nigerian reality many Nigerians will recognize: backbreaking hustle and economic strife.
But though Ishaya evokes the Nigerian everyman, he remains an outsider, at home and at school, the series’ title hinting as much. When he cannot afford his trip to London where he hopes to partake of an art fellowship hosted by his longtime idol, Ishaya steals from mob bosses Government (Bucci Franklin) and Oga Rambo (Bolanle Ninalowo), endangering his younger sister Rahila (Tomi Ojo), and causing his mother (Funke Akindele-Bello) to evict him from the family home. And after a bit of subterfuge wins Ishaya a scholarship to the luxurious Wilmer Academy, he finds himself in an unfamiliar territory of wealth, away from his lowly Isale-Eko domicile.
Neither accepted at home nor feeling at home at school, Ishaya pursues his dream of becoming a successful visual artist, even as he tries to escape the hold of the two vicious mob lords—when Ishaya cannot repay what he stole from them, they make him sell drugs (not the kind bought over the counter) to his new rich schoolmates.
While this series covers several themes—teenage angst, class snobbery, romantic betrayal—it is primarily about ambition, specifically the sort that hurts those within its blast radius. Ishaya’s drive makes him thoughtless towards his doting girlfriend Adufe (Gbubemi Ejeye), making an adversary out of her. And Atlas (Olumide Oworu) will perpetuate romance scams if that’s what it takes to land an art grant. But the story doesn’t always convincingly justify this theme. To show ambition can be destructive, a flashback scene shows Ishaya’s father and his young son astride a motorcycle, a piece of art work and a motorcyclist’s body wedged between them. An accident occurs off-camera a few moments later, crippling father and killing son. But this scene more exposes a governmental failing and a father’s recklessness than it proves that ambition can be ruinous. Were a so-called megacity like Lagos rid of such medieval means of public transportation as commercial bikes, and were Ishaya’s father more conscientious, perhaps Ishaya’s brother would be alive.
As if to foreground the story’s core motif, the characters often talk about their “dreams.” “I’m chasing my dream,” Ishaya says to Rahila. Rahila tells him in another scene, “unrealistic dreams are destructive,” the kind of aphoristic line not typical of a conversation between teenage siblings. But then this series does not stand out for its dialogue. Certain lines come off as unnatural, sometimes because the series’ attempt at wit is a bit on-the-nose, as in a scene where Carmen (Elma Mbadiwe) says a line from Fave’s Baby Riddim to Ishaya, perfectly in sync with the song itself scoring the scene.
With its teenage characters, high school backdrop and lavish supply of illicit drugs, Far From Home resembles many American high school flicks; it also comes with some of that genre’s stock characters: the popular bully and the shy nerd. More Hollywood trends: a female cheerleading squad fawns over a male football team; and in one scene, a boy and a girl bump into each other in the library, books spilling to the ground, romance emerging in the wake of that collision. But perhaps this series’ most obvious influence is the South African Netflix show Blood & Water (2021).
The pilot episode of both series feature a birthday feast, a pall overhanging both; the parents of both protagonists have a complicated relationship—in Ishaya’s case, his mother blames his artist father for their child’s death; and in both series, an absentee sibling haunts the protagonists’ psyche. Whether or not these influences are coincidental, one thing is clear: as far as appearances go, Far From Home is far from original. Even Wilmer Academy’s school uniform is a dead ringer for the one of Parkhurst High, the elite private school in the South African series.
Loaded with these familiar tropes, this series could only mark itself out by the quality of its story and how it tells it. In which case, action—rather than character, emotional dilemma and social conflict—mostly drives this series. Ishaya’s demons are often physical: how to knot a tie, how to sell drugs anonymously, and dreariest of all, how to avoid the wrath of his mob bosses. The story’s kinetic energy reaches a climax in the final act, with the invasion of the private school and the sequences showing hand-to-hand combats, moments of excitement for certain viewers no doubt.
Even though the story does not pay much attention to character, it still does more justice to its rich main character, Carmen, than it does its poor one, Ishaya. More specifically, the story grounds the former in a more complex emotional universe than it does the latter. Both characters have their personal battles, even parallel ones—they both crave parental approval—but it is Carmen’s that proves the more poignant, because the story gives her emotional life more winding detail. This series may not emphasize class conflict in any expansive way, but it is not without bias in how it renders the haves and the have-nots.
Perhaps this is most evident in a scene where Ishaya mends his friendship with Michael (Moshood Fattah) using a few banal words of apology and, more importantly, a cash gift. Ironically, in an earlier scene where Ishaya confronts his school roommate Frank (Emeka Nwagbaraocha), he tells him the rich are wont to think they can always buy off the poor. And yet Ishaya does exactly that, thus betraying the story’s mean portrayal of the poor as an emotionally simplistic lot for whom money is the cure to all troubles.
“Far From Home” mostly gets its pull from the acting prowess of its cast of mostly newcomer actors. Elma Mbadiwe is convincing as the emotionally tortured Carmen; Mike Afolarin as Ishaya, too. When the series ends, one senses that a season two is in the offing, given there are certain plot loose ends. If there would be one, one can only hope the story tones down the glib action and linger more on the interior lives of its characters.
