I know I’ve been a little late talking about this one publicly, but I need to put it on record: The Polygamist might be one of the best shows I’ve watched all year.

It’s a South African series, 22 episodes, and I’ll be honest — the dubbing almost scared me off before I started. A lot of you told me you couldn’t get into it because of it. My workaround was watching it peripherally, letting it play while I moved around the kitchen, reading the captions instead of locking in on the mouths. Once I did that, I was fully in. The writing and the performances are strong enough to carry you past that.

At the center of it all is Jonasi — a man who starts out as the kind of guy nobody would look twice at, gets poured into and built up by the woman who becomes his first wife, Joyce, and slowly transforms into someone almost unrecognizable. By the time we catch up with him in the present timeline, he’s married to Joyce, carrying on with his mistress-turned-second-wife Matipa (who’s pregnant with twins), and still finding his way back to Essie — his actual first love, the woman who was there for him before any of this started, and the mother of a daughter he never publicly claimed.

That’s the thing that makes this show work. It’s not just polygamy for shock value. It’s a slow build showing you exactly how someone gets to that place — and once you get the backstory on Jonasi, you understand the ego driving every single decision, good or catastrophic.

And it does go catastrophic. The domestic violence in this show is not played for drama — it’s genuinely hard to watch, and it should be. Jonasi’s ego, the same ego that let him believe he could juggle multiple households and never face consequences, is the same ego that turns physically abusive toward the women in his life. That’s also the same ego that gets him killed, in a way. When he’s diagnosed with HIV, he refuses treatment because he can’t accept it about himself — and it’s that refusal, not the diagnosis itself, that destroys him. I appreciated that the show didn’t turn this into a death-sentence storyline for shock value. It made clear, repeatedly, that this is treatable. His ego is what made it fatal.

Where the show really gets its claws in you is the finale stretch. Joyce, who spends most of the series trying to protect a “perfect marriage” image while quietly falling apart, orchestrates her own revenge — and it’s colder than anything I expected going in. Meanwhile the next generation is already repeating the cycle: the son inherits everything and starts becoming his father in real time, and by the end of the episode he’s involved with the same young woman who was previously entangled with his dad. The secret daughter, meanwhile, gets caught with her own half-sister’s boyfriend — during a family celebration, no less. It’s messy in the way only really good family drama can be messy.

If I’m rating it, I’m giving The Polygamist a 9.5 out of 10 — the only thing knocking it down is Netflix’s dubbing, and that’s not even really the show’s fault. Everything else — the performances, the pacing, the way they built Jonasi’s descent instead of just handing it to you — was excellent. I’m already thinking about what a second season needs: more of Jonasi’s history before Essie, because I don’t believe for a second these were the only women in his orbit.

Want more of my thoughts on this one? I go deeper on the Apple Podcast version of Club Kempire and over on Patreon. Come pull up:

— By Kempire