Review: Gloss, Excess and the Chaos of Youth, ‘MTV Shuga Mashariki’s’ Most Honest Reflection May Be Unintentional

Teen and campus dramas come in all forms, each promising its own spin on its generation’s anxieties and habits. Some lean into the hopeful territory of self-exploration and coming-of-age, others dwell in the melodrama and impermanence of youth. But when I watched the trailer for MTV Shuga Mashariki, I wasn’t sure what kind of show I was walking into. Is it a gritty crime drama where cops chase kids through Scarface-style shootouts? A CW-grade soap where students throw parties and betray their parents’ expectations every few episodes? Or an earnest attempt to explore how genuinely sad and lost young people can be?

In the first three episodes made available for review, the show doesn’t quite decide. Instead, it tries to be everything at once – its provocation disguised as conflict, its chaos mistaken for complexity. And maybe that’s the point. Portraying a band of students as they navigate the complexities of their relationships, MTV Shuga Mashariki pairs every character it has its hands on immediately, revelling more in vignettes of sliced romantic flair than in any real attempt to build on the nuances and emotional depth of its characters.

In its attempt to capture campus life in its full vibrancy, Shuga often stretches minor hijinks into overwrought emotional opera – sometimes playing out these arcs offscreen entirely – while brushing past moments that should carry real weight. Its characters feel built from a grab bag of clichés: the broke captain, the loudmouth radio host, the Christian good girl, the gaming-obsessed loner, the swaggering playboy and their constant shadow entourage. It’s almost obvious that the actors – none of whom transcend the material – are aware there’s little inherent depth to their roles. As a result, their performances feel hollow and overly performative, so telegraphed in both dialogue and gesture that even a blind viewer wouldn’t miss a beat of the plot.

Their lives are wildly unrealistic, and yet their chaotic swirl may still reflect something true about a generation raised on curated feeds and filtered identities. In its most absurd moments, the show unintentionally captures something real: a youth culture that’s glittery, chaotic, cynical, and ultimately insincere.

Like most recent shows on Kenyan screens, Shuga leans hard into aesthetics – swirling camera work, expressive set design and makeup, moody lighting, a sleek, murmuring soundtrack – but the story gets lost in its own reflection. Sure, the show is beautiful, courtesy of Enos Olik’s ever stylish camera skills; many frames could live on an Instagram reel forever. But this beauty feels like camouflage for the emptiness underneath, feeling very much like a Euphoria look-alike with a third of the runtime and even less of the heart. The characters don’t talk so much as pose. Emotional beats are set up, then dropped in favour of another stylised detour. And beneath it all, there is really nothing to root for – none of the characters show any genuineness or ingenuity, nor do any of the conflicts carry any real stakes. It’s all sensory overload with very little to hold onto.

Maybe my campus experience was just boring, but the idea that a show about university life would spend more time in clubs and fanfare than in one well-written scene in the classrooms, hostels or anywhere on university grounds really – where these characters should exist predominantly – feels detached and manufactured. Shuga’s characters drift through dimly lit parties and inflated sexual musings, emotionally unmoored and exaggerated to the point of exhaustion, while the complexities of their families, hustles, and hobbies (potentially more compelling) are barely skimmed through.

If these first three episodes are any indication, this will grow tiring very fast. The show seems obsessed with its own self-image. When aesthetics trump narrative and aggravated monologues become a stand-in for meaning, the scenes play out like an endlessly looping music video of objectification. For a show that claims to advocate for women’s rights and critiques rape culture, it’s troubling how much it indulges the very vices it claims to condemn. Most of the female characters are hypersexualised – even the church girl, who admits to waiting for marriage one moment, and is unbuckling belts the next. I’m almost certain the Bechdel Test is rarely passed, if ever. A rape victim is portrayed twice in her inebriated state to build on the tragedy; then, after the crime, she is reduced to a podcast conversation and a phone call declaring her death. Utterly tasteless.

There are barely any quiet moments – no space for reflection, no time to let a story breathe. Instead, we’re introduced to character after character inside a tangled web of sex and spectacle. Maybe this is the reality on the ground in Kenyan universities today. Or maybe Shuga is trying to capture the drama and despair of late-stage adolescence but in its attempt to be edgy, filters everything through such an exaggerated, unconscious lens that it risks becoming parody.

Considering how it handles its most sensitive subjects—the ones seemingly financing its production – sexual and reproductive health, rape culture, moral policing, and, based on the trailer, LGBTQ+ rights – it’s fair to say Shuga leans on the weight of these real issues to shield itself from critique. But the sloppy, sensationalist way it builds narratives around these topics will earn it publicity it doesn’t quite deserve, and ultimately does a disservice to the very causes it claims to champion.

It’s disheartening to think that just the first episode of the original Kenyan edition of Shuga (released in 2009) may have held more intrapersonal nuance, genuine camaraderie, urban Kenyan cultural texture, and tonal clarity than this new version could ever hope to achieve through all its episodes – but that might well be the case. For such a star-studded cast of young Kenyan actors, and a production value that’s almost unrivaled, MTV Shuga Mashariki’s reality feels unreal and overstated; its insight buried beneath the gloss. It’s a show too desperate to be cool, too anxious to pause, and too slick to be honest. If audiences have grown attention-deficit that they no longer care about substance or story, as we’re made to believe, this aligns perfectly. Maybe the next episodes in the coming weeks will change my mind. I sincerely hope so.

MTV Shuga Mashariki airs every Tuesday at 10:00 PM on BET and 11:00 PM on Citizen TV, with a next-day release on YouTube at 8:00 PM.