‘Power Book III: Raising Kanan’ Review: Addictive Starz Drama Returns

Raquel “Raq” Thomas is not molded after your typical TV queenpin. She isn’t an unassuming victim who suddenly finds herself rising to power in a bid to save herself from degradation, to lift her family out of financial ruin or to reluctantly take on the unscrupulous responsibilities of a dead husband. And she’s certainly no mere “gender-flipped” response to the lovable antihero archetype that dominated television in the early aughts.

No, Raq is just a born killer in sultry peekaboo sweaters and curve-hugging leather pants who can’t abide a power vacuum. She does not hesitate before pulling a trigger. Even more ominously, she’s a mother and sister who wields her love like a rope, using her devotion to control more than to nurture. Beware momma’s kiss: Her lips are laced with poison.

Played by Patina Miller in one of TV’s most magnetic (and beautifully costumed) under-the-radar lead performances, Raq heads the early 1990s Jamaica, Queens, crack cocaine empire at the center of Power Book III: Raising Kanan. Created by Sascha Penn, the third offshoot of Starz’s Power Universe mega-franchise from producer Courtney A. Kemp — a sort of drug-trade crime drama answer to The Sopranos launched in 2014 — Raising Kanan is both more narratively meticulous and emotionally grounded than a threequel/prequel crime drama spinoff has any right to be.

What began as a series that might have been pitched as “YA New Jack City” (complimentary!), Raising Kanan has developed across three seasons into a quietly compelling family drama, a show that explores lesbophobia and fraternal strife as deeply as it does the explosive dynamics of illegal trade. The first two episodes of Season 4 continue this trend, showcasing new depths and shifting alliances among its sprawling ensemble. Although at times as frothy and high-concept as a telenovela (and dispatching of peripheral female characters rather speedily and often brutally), the tense, slow-burn series never dismisses the very real psychology underpinning its characters’ agonizing experiences of violence, betrayal and moral immolation.

On Power, which ended in 2020, rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson played Kanan Stark, a villainous, revenge-seeking drug lord whose release from prison leads to the Greek tragedy-esque downfall of his own son. Raising Kanan leans into this classical storytelling, chronicling his origins in the 1990s as a quasi-geeky 15-year-old slated for prestigious Stuyvesant High School who pivots pathways to follow his linchpin mother, Raq, into the drug game. (50 Cent, as adult Kanan, provides the unfortunately insipid posthumous voiceover that bookends each episode. Thankfully, his earworm theme song makes up for it.) Mekai Curtis plays the teenage Kanan being torn in all directions.

Raq is a master manipulator who claims to value loyalty above all else, especially from her henchmen brothers Marvin (London Brown) and Lou (Malcolm Mays) and her only son, yet constantly destabilizes the three of them with selfish mind games and power plays that genuinely harm them. All done, of course, in the name of protecting them. Over time, Kanan must confront the reality that his mom, who has been his whole world, isn’t just a bad person to everyone else, but lies to, double-crosses and puppeteers him, too.

Much of the series’ pathos hinges on the growing schism between mother and son as Kanan begins to understand the horrors of Raq’s machinations and deceit (including tricking him into assassinating his biological father), leading him to try to go into business for himself. In true Shakespearean fashion, we watch as Kanan becomes as grimly ruthless as the person from whom he’s trying to divide himself.

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As of late, I’ve encountered few family dramas as bingeable as Raising Kanan, which is frankly remarkable considering how bleak the series can be. But it is bleak in the way, say, Hamlet is bleak: Bloody murder is inevitable, but all the tragedy somehow invigorates the soul. The series is not afraid to upend expectations, including letting justice languish where other crime shows would wind their way toward a more ethically satisfying conclusion. During the first season, an innocent character finds a questionable vial, which in other examples of the genre may typically foreshadow a long and arduous addiction storyline. What actually happens to that person made me gasp. In fact, I’ve legitimately gasped and even cheered a number of times watching Raising Kanan, a series in which there are no heroes, but people you end up rooting for just the same.

The third season ends on such a shocking moment: Raq’s alternate narco rival/romantic interest Unique (Joey Bada$$) triumphantly returns in true soap-operatic fashion, stepping into the final frame to loom over the cadaver of his coldblooded brother Ronnie (Grantham Coleman), who not only tried to kill him several episodes previously, but left him to rot in the woods. Thanks to Bada$$’ captivating warmth as an actor, Unique has grown from a simple Season 1 McGuffin (when Raq needed a sneering plot opponent) to the closest thing the show has to a knight in shining armor — a young man who constantly suffers Raq’s humiliations in both business and in love.

The Season 4 opener helps audiences understand how Unique miraculously survived this fratricide attempt — involving a shady veterinarian and an underling to whom he still owes money. Unique is now a Frankenstein’s Monster of his former self, physically scarred and mentally volatile because of his traumatic brain injury.

Elsewhere, Raq is still dealing with the emotional fallout of her affair with Unique, whom she believes is dead, while her brothers continually try to crawl out from under their sister’s thumb and establish their own identities. Hotheaded older brother Marvin, who’s never quite able to reform his penchant for viciousness despite trying, is now doing side jobs behind Raq’s back for Stefano Marchetti (none other than Tony Danza, who nails the necessary congenial menace), a low-level mafioso who’s been both friend and foe to Raq’s crack empire. Tormented younger brother Lou, an guilt-ridden alcoholic who just wants to strike out on his own as a hip-hop and R&B producer, is finally making a name for himself in the music industry, with the help of a slick label exec (Josh Pais) and talented but uncultivated new act B-Rilla (Pardison “Pardi” Fontaine, already a new player to watch).

The show’s heart and soul, though, is not Kanan himself, but his cousin and best friend Jukebox (Hailey Kilgore on Raising Kanan and Anika Noni Rose before her on Power). Marvin’s daughter, she’s also the only person Raq seems to love unconditionally and without burden. A young queer woman who has experienced everything from the terrible loss of a first love to the violent rejection of both her parents (because of her sexual orientation and more masculine presentation), she dreams that a singing career will uplift her out of her dysfunctional family and the hustle of life on the Southside — only to be sabotaged again and again by the actions of her relatives. Joining the army in Season 4 only presents new homophobic challenges.

“Heartbreaks, setbacks,” 50 Cent croons at the beginning of every episode of Raising Kanan. Jukebox may not be the title character, but her journey encompasses these words most acutely.