http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/06/arts/television/queen-sugar-own.html 2016-09-06 00:02:08 Review: ‘Queen Sugar,’ on OWN, Yields Family Drama This series, the latest on Oprah Winfrey’s cable channel, brings three feuding siblings back together, a sugar operation hanging in the balance. === More than five years after it The series, based on a novel by The siblings are of course radically different, because that’s the rule in these stress-riddled family tableaus. There is Charley (Dawn-Lyen Gardner), an efficient crisis-management sort of woman married to a professional basketball player (Timon Kyle Durrett). There is Nova (Rutina Wesley), a journalist who also dabbles in out-of-the-mainstream spirituality. And their brother, Ralph Angel (Kofi Siriboe), is a brooding type with a prison record. The show’s creator, But the show also wants to be a lush, titillating romance. When we meet Nova, who is black, she’s in bed with her white, married lover. By the end of the third episode Charley seems to be warming to a local fellow although she’s still married. And are Ralph Angel and Blue’s teacher striking a spark? Then there’s the save-the-farm angle. The siblings find themselves in possession of the family sugar operation, which had fallen dormant. Will they be forced to sell, or can they overcome their differences and make a go of it? It’s a throwback to Dust Bowl-era stories. It also takes three episodes for that question to jell, though it presumably will be the foundational one as this series, which has already been given a second season, moves along. This grab-bag approach has certainly worked well enough for other prime-time soap operas, and it will no doubt find an audience here, but the strands interweave awkwardly in the early going. Some genuinely lazy scene-making saps the show of credibility. Davis’s time on the basketball court doesn’t last long, but it seems filmed by someone who has never been to a professional basketball game. Nova’s journalistic moments are brief, but whoever concocted them doesn’t appear to know much about how real news organizations work. Still, the show has an appealing cast, and it has segments that really grab the attention. The save-the-farm theme, for instance, worked to death in the days when television and films were mostly white, turns out to be not as familiar as it seems. In a charged scene in Episode 3, black farmers meet to discuss their concerns, among them banks that treat them differently from white farmers. It’s a small but galvanizing moment, one that suggests that this series isn’t merely an evening soap opera after all.