Hand on heart, I begin every show I watch with a sincere wish for it to be good. After all, who wants to spend hours on something that isn’t? Having avoided every detail about Kash Money, the latest addition to the bulging pile of Kenyan shows on Netflix, I went in hoping for something—anything—beyond the bare minimum. Despite that hope, Kash Money is exactly what I feared: no hidden brilliance, no bold reinvention, no cult appeal. Just bad storytelling disguised under a grotesque cosmetic sheen.
Produced by Insignia Productions, Kash Money follows the wealthy and dysfunctional Jenga family, whose lives are thrown into disarray after the mysterious death of their patriarch.
From the outset, it’s audacious in how quickly it alienates its audience. The pilot is stitched together from montages of expository narration, displays of power, a bar scene ripped from a bad music video, a fetishized business negotiation, and a rejected proposal inside a gun range. Kash Money feels like the brainchild of a rather inebriated eureka moment—one that, upon execution, could only wish to reach that initial high. The writing is asinine and derivative, bloating itself with every subplot imaginable, stretching in all directions to tell a simple story: the inner and outer battles to inherit the wealth of a slain tycoon.
Yet, despite its sprawling subplots, Kash Money struggles to hold its weight. There’s the powerful but sweet hitman (Morris Mwangi), the love triangle involving a tycoon, Joe Njenga (John Sibi-Okumu), his wife (Sanaipei Tande), and her lover (Shiv Singh), and the unsettlingly intimate family dynamic between the daughter (Amara Tari) and a cousin (Lenana Kariba). Add a political tug-of-war that confines Janet Mbugua’s character to nothing more than authoritative stare-downs at her man-child son, and a Knives Out-style crime mystery led by an oblivious cop (Maqbul Mohammed) trying to solve the tycoon’s murder. Even with all this, three hours still felt like too much of a sacrifice for a show so lazily plotted.
It’s amusing to imagine that in one sequence, Joe Jenga’s health is compromised, he is poisoned, someone follows him to kill him, and a blackmailed hitman takes out his bodyguards to kidnap him. Yet, when his body is later found in his bed with a gunshot wound to the head, the moment still manages to be anticlimactic. Neither the show’s heroes nor its villains have any real presence beyond their introductions. With more than one central character actively irritating to watch, dialogue laced with soap opera clichés, and stereotypes abound, no character is allowed more than a few lines of self-scrutiny. The plot either crams entire seasons’ worth of development into a single episode or wastes whole episodes going in circles. Kash Money is a collective effort in mediocre writing, and whether constrained by a lacklustre script or simply denied the chance to emote beyond extremes, none of the acting rises above it.
Tonally and narratively threadbare, Kash Money is visually vibrant but emotionally disconnected. Its world is awash with striking costumes and production design. Each frame glows with an electric brightness that, at least, keeps it from looking as bland as most other shows on the streaming giant. But beyond that, everything else is either dull, frustrating, or actively grating. Even the gratuitous, universally sleek aesthetic—arguably the show’s main draw—eventually wears out and falls flat. At this point, it’s almost a rule on Kenyan screens that subpar material can be excused as long as it’s wrapped in just the right amount of flashy style.
The camerawork is often off— either too close, too far, or angled more for flair than function. Sometimes, it wastes away in aerial shots or captures over-furnished sets that reduce characters to archetypes. Montages are squeezed into unlikely places to rejuvenate a stunted plot, and the editing—seemingly designed for dopamine-deprived eyes—works in tandem with the show’s frantic pacing, ensuring the audience never lingers long enough to process the absurdity unfolding on screen. And then there’s the “big reveal” at the end, which, instead of delivering shock or intrigue, just made me laugh out louder than I expected—so, in a way, I did get my fair share of dopamine after all.
Ultimately, Kash Money is a colourful mess – a flurry of rushed plot lines and awkward dialogue that left me in a haze of second-hand embarrassment. Following in the footsteps of Single Kiasi (another Insignia Production), I am neither surprised nor disappointed at this point. It joins the long line of formulaic, corporate-induced incarnations of Kenyan drama – not trying anything new, riddled with clichés, and completely removed from any Kenyan identity beyond butchered sheng, but with just enough visual panache to masquerade as something worthwhile. It’s too unremarkable to inspire intense loathing from me, especially when those who made it seem to care even less. So, in the end, Kash Money is, without a doubt, one of the Kenyan shows of all time.
Kash Money is streaming on Netflix.
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