It is often said that television, at its best, is the stuff of dreams and memory. Great movies and shows, and I’m talking about those that are truly great, have a particular texture that partly owes its form to theatre, but that mainly exist in a suspended self-reality with its own laws and continuum. Hence, we remember them the same way we remember a dream, or a memory. County 49 is a really great example of a dreamy show. There are a few reasons I remember it as such. It transpires during the course of the longest single day that has ever been suggested to an audience, an incredible amount of developments take place in supposedly less than 12 hours; its claims to about Kenyan politics set in the fictional county of Bwatele seems to be a geo-political Frankenstein’s monster.
All this really wouldn’t trouble me if the show had maintained its own contained world and developed it accordingly. I have seen Likarion Wanaina’s work like Supa Modo and he is by all means quite a talented and imaginative filmmaker, so what exactly happened here? County 49 is an entertaining idea of a television show. It could have been imported from some other reality, because it certainly holds little resemblance to our own. I will touch only a little on what is generally wrong with products such as these, before going in on this product specifically (operative word being product).
When a production decides to interpolate a show like the South African hit The Republic for Kenyan audiences, they must understand that African states are quite different, and especially for a political drama, you’d think that would be pretty obvious. However, like I said before, cine-art are dreams, and little details like that hardly matter so long as there is human truth within all the nonsense. In County 49, there is none. Only a bunch of clichés pritt-glued together in the most easily recognisable way.
Every single stage of this production seems to have been confused, or rushing it, or doing it for the money, just like the characters whose stories they were telling. We’ll start at the beginning, which here means the script. Throughout the whole show, every once in a while, there appears a large title card informing us of the time of day. Supposedly, according to the writers, this whole season transpires over the course of one day. Well, I simply don’t believe them.
A terrorist group kidnaps the governor, receives a Ksh. 4 billion ransom, breaks out their leader from jail, throws a party to celebrate their win, gets caught, breaks out again, holes up at some mysterious woman’s mansion (the sun is still out! blazing!), sends out two bombs and use their location as bargaining chips for a jet to Sierra Leone. One day, all happening well before the evening sets in. And that’s just the A plot. Also, I have not encountered a government model in which counties have their own ministers. Those job titles usually belong on the national-executive level. There are just too many things I was unable to buy, suspension of disbelief and all. Not even dreams are this… dreamy. This crosses the line of velvet anachronistic cine-art, the likes that don’t make much factual sense but contain tremendous human truth in them – the films of David Lynch, House of Cards (as far as credulity goes), hell, even Marvel movies. And by crossing this line, County 49 steps into the realm of absurdity and bad product, which, in my opinion, can only be enjoyed as a guilty pleasure.
The direction is chock-full of sins as well. For instance, take our action star Malik (Peter Kawa), crouching down presumably hiding from an enemy. When he gets up we see all that was in front of him was a fence, and the enemy, had he had a pair of eyes, could have spotted and shot him quite easily. When he’s sneaking into a premises, nobody hears him, nobody sees him, when they clearly should. This is flat-out lazy filmmaking. The action scenes are questionable. The choreography is all underdeveloped, and stilted. Quentin Tarantino once said that a good action director is by default one of the best directors in the world because of how difficult it is to pull off action scenes. Likarion Wanaina, and to be fair, I should say, his team, were not ready for an action project. They started shooting this right before our August election, around the time Raila Odinga announced Martha Karua as his running mate, and that for me perhaps explains everything. If it looks rushed, that’s because it is.
Post-production is a department that can get away with the textbook. The editing is fine, if not pedestrian – what they were editing remains the problem. I do have a slight bone to pick with our choice of soundtracks, this show being a fine example. Who in our forty-two hells possessed us with melancholy piano keys? They seem to pop up in every Kenyan show and film, and its desired effect has been overused and worn out. Now, it may be the most tawdry of things in our cinema. What we need to do is get rid of it. No more melancholy piano keys! (a campaign?)
County 49, however, as I stated earlier, has that just-one-more-episode allure, as some kind of guilty pleasure. That I can ascribe to the fantastic cast on display here. The cue of the entire Showmax platform, this ensemble. Wakio Mzenge is phenomenal as Governor Nerimah. Ainea Ojiambo is always a treat to watch, a near perfect performance as Ox, the Big Bad. They were my only source of excitement that got me over to the next episode, and the next, and the next. For the lead – Kawa’s Malik, I imagine they sought an Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis hyper-masculine presence to sell all the action-tropes in the script.
I can imagine the expectation the showrunners had for this show. It was big, loud, and was ostensibly about corruption, but not really. It was supposed to be a juggernaut, which to some degree it has been, and quite a few people have admitted to enjoying it. However, for how long will we be complacent with stories that use our names and are marketed towards us, but have no trace of our own place and time? Not long. The fact that this was such a huge undertaking, encompassing what I believe to be a large team and a huge budget, means that we shall hold this and other projects of its kind to higher standards than usual because of their crucial responsibility at this crucial time in the Kenyan film and TV industry.
County 49 is available to stream on Showmax.
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