First Thoughts on “She Must Be Obeyed” Episode 1-2

Funke Akindele produced and stars in She Must Be Obeyed, a new Amazon Prime series that she claims “addresses bullying in the music industry”. But in its first two episodes, which the purview of this review is strictly limited to, that premise is difficult to establish. It is amazing just how many different aspects She Must Be Obeyed is able to display, but do not take this versatility as a strength. Instead it is a weakness for how She’s story hardly progresses in these two hours, instead much time is spent expanding the width of the story and introducing more and more characters. It is also why it is hard to pin down the film’s premise. You would expect Funke Akindele’s version to be the most accurate, she is the producer, after all, but other narrations of the premise deviate from hers’ nearly to the point of contradiction. Google paints it as “a window into the lives of three successful music stars, the cutthroat rivalries and backstabbing activities they engage in”, while IMDb calls it “the story of Victoria’s insatiable ambition to rise in the entertainment industry”, placing the spotlight on Nancy Isime‘s character and her attempt to climb up the industry under She’s apprenticeship. 

Here goes our attempt to condense the first two hours of She Must Be Obeyed into a few sentences. The story follows Siyanbola, or SHE (Funke Akindele), one of Nigeria’s leading musicians, whose obsession with being the biggest female artist frequently leads to clashes with X-Cite (Waje, the singer) and Tito (Vee, of Big Brother), her rival singers, sometimes physically, but mostly through a number of online trolls account with which she derides and spreads nasty rumours about the competition. Around She is a team of aides that work to help make her the star she is—consisting of the effeminate manager Sisqo (Akah Nnani), cousin-turned-driver Bola (Lateef Adedimeji) and newcomer personal assistant Victoria (Nancy Isime). This suffices as a description of the most pertinent story points related to She, but there are other characters who enjoy significant screen times, like, Adaeze (Rachael Okonkwo), the woman who actually vocalises She’s songs while She takes the credit. Other characters are Etim (Ime Bishop Umoh) and Ruka (Lizzy Jay), She’s house staff. She is the centrepiece of all this chaos, the thread that links everyone together, and the first two episodes try to establish her relationships with the characters around her, and these relationships are almost always toxic. 

It is difficult to ascertain what is the main purpose behind She Must Be Obeyed, but to do that would be to assume that there is even a consensus reason for its existence in the first place. We’ve already seen Funke Akindele speak on how it is meant to be an expose of the music industry, but that can not be accepted seeing as its portrayal of the industry is far from realistic. Can one of Nigeria’s biggest megastars—like Tiwa Savage in real life—go home after an award event to take off her wig, and pull out multiple phones which she will use to push online vitriol against the person who won over her? Plausible, but extremely unlikely. Unrealisms like this, like her treatment of her staff like slaves and not paid workers and the fact that she was able to successfully make a music career out of someone else’s voice for seven years, make She Must Be Obeyed‘s claim to be a representation of Nigeria’s music industry lack substance. 

In the absence of this, we are left with comedy, but She Must Be Obeyed somehow manages to fail horridly at this as well, despite the genre being one of the most recognisable aspects of Funke Akindele’s filmography. The woman who brought us The Return Of Jenifa in 2011 (she had only starred in the original) and then Jenifa’s Diary after that, who produced and wrote Omo Ghetto in 2010, who holds the top two spots on the highest grossing Nigerian movies for Battle On Buka Street and Omo Ghetto: The Saga, should not have her most recent production struggle with comedy. And yet it does. So many ‘jokes’ land some distance from their targets, many scenes do not evoke the laughter they were intended for. 

She Must Be Obeyed‘s fragmented nature may have you feel you are watching various segments of the same series. It remains to be seen if the latter three episodes will piece everything together brilliantly, but that will require a hefty amount of work. Left separate, these aspects appear very disjointed. The storyline with Adaeze and her family, consisting of Mike Ezuruonye as her brother and Patience Ozokwor as her mother appear very African Magic Epic–like, as the indigent family struggles to raise money to send their youngest son to school, while their stingy uncle, Chiwetalu Agu, disappoints them. Scenes involving She’s household staff could be from the stables of African Magic Urban’s comedy sitcoms, featuring a cook and a housemaid in prolonged exchanges in their very stereotypical, not-very-funny Calabar and Yoruba accents. 

And seeing potential get wasted paints a sad picture of the entire affair. This series is packed with top actors, all the names mentioned above plus others like Shaffy Bello, Blossom Chukwujekwu, Adunni Ade and more in smaller capacities, so to see them assembled for one of the more original plots in Nollywood, all to no real results, is a sorry sight. And a few of these actors do put in excellent work that may go unacknowledged in the light of the series it appears in, like Akah Nnaji’s immersive performance as Sisqo. The music, too, must be commended. It may have been easier to license popular Nigerian tracks for the soundtrack, but the original tracks composed for the series do the job decently enough. 

Asides these positives, none of which comes close to neutralising the awful plot, the series does not have much going for it, except of course the hope, however bleak, that it can turn things around in the last three episodes.