I remember those days when I'd be switching from African Magic Family to African Magic Showcase just to make sure I didn't miss any episode of Hustle, the one that had Sam Maurice before he started acting those skits he calls films on YouTube. That man had real screen presence back then. I remember how I used to drop whatever I was doing the moment I heard the theme song. I knew one way or another Sam Maurice would get into trouble with his landlady Sola Sobowale. 🤣
And I really liked Forbidden too. That's when Kunle Remi started properly breaking into Nollywood. I remember watching him play Oliseh in Getaway and also as Zane in Tinsel. He was really hot back then and honestly I didn't even like him because of it. Everyone was drooling over him and it just got exhausting. But the boy could act sha, whether I wanted to admit it or not.
Another two of my all time favourite African Magic series were My Siblings and I and The Johnsons. These are the kinds of shows that understood exactly what they were. The Johnsons in particular was pure comedy gold. That was Nigerian family chaos that doesn’t need to be explained to you, it just hits. The writing wasn’t trying too hard. It was comfortable in its own skin, and that confidence is what made it work. Nigerian comedy has this specific texture to it, the timing, the exaggeration, the way characters talk past each other, that when Nollywood gets it right, it’s untouchable. Nobody is doing it the way they do it.
Then Wura came and the buzz was genuinely high. I was watching at first but somewhere along the line I just drifted, started doing other things, stopped paying close attention to TV altogether. Life does that. But then I saw the first teaser for Slum King and I knew my guy Tobi Bakre was in it, so I just decided to watch. And it pulled me right back in. That’s the thing about Nigerian drama. It doesn’t need much to grab you. It doesn’t need a Marvel budget or some complicated mythology. It needs characters that feel real, tension that makes sense, and actors who know what they’re doing. When those three things line up, Nollywood drama is genuinely world class.
I think that’s the bigger point here. Nollywood has properly hacked both drama and comedy in a way that a lot of industries haven’t. You don’t even have to do too much for these series to work. There’s an emotional shorthand that Nigerian storytelling operates on, a shared cultural frequency, and when the writing respects that instead of fighting it, the results are something special.
Another series I loved so much was Battleground. That’s where I found out Chike could also act. I’d watched him on The Voice and was impressed by that, but then seeing him in Battleground doing actual dramatic work and doing it really well, to me that was a proper surprise. It’s always satisfying when someone steps outside what people expect of them and still delivers.
Most times I come across Tinsel now, I just watch it for the nostalgia. That was peak Nollywood telenovela. The drama was almost theatrical at times, and I mean that as a compliment. It had that irresistible quality where you knew it was a lot, and you were watching anyway. It helped build an entire generation of Nigerian TV actors, gave them a stage, gave them reps, gave them range. You can trace so many Nollywood careers back to that set.
Anyway, I’m writing all of this because I just started watching the new African Magic limited series called Striped, starring Daniel Etim Effiong and Kunle Remi, and I think it’s really good.
African Magic gave a lot of us our television education. Looking back, these weren’t just shows. To most of us, they were the background noise of weekday evenings and lazy Saturday afternoons. And the fact that there’s still new stuff coming out that’s worth talking about, that’s not nothing. That’s actually everything.
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