From Bill Dubuque, creator of Ozark, M.I.A. hits Peacock with all eight of its episodes at once. Shannon Gisela stars as Etta, smart, resourceful, and college-bound, who’s also a little spontaneous: maybe she’d like to stay in South Florida and work for the family business, which includes a bustling marina, tourist trawls, fishing charters, and…another, hidden revenue stream. It also doesn’t take too long before Etta’s life changes radically forever. M.I.A. also stars Cary Elwes, Danay Garcia, Tovah Feldshuh, Brittany Adebumola, Dylan Jackson, and David Denman. 

M.I.A.: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: “Killers aren’t born, they’re made.” We hear the voice of Etta Tiger Jonze (Gisela) over flash-forwards: acts of violence and blood in the water. 

The Gist: Etta’s running alligator-watching tours out of Key Largo in a flat-bottom craft nicknamed The Revenge when we first meet her. She shows off her photographic memory, wowing the tourists as a walking Wikipedia with crack comedic timing, while her parents, Leah (Garcia) and Dan (Denman), wish she’d focus and commit to the University of Miami. Yeah, cool, she might – but what she really wants to do is go out with Dan and her brothers on their fishing charters. Her persistence wins over Leah’s worries, Etta takes the helm with her dad, and a few hours later the family is toasting another lucrative day of work. Because out in open water, off the coast of Miami, the Tiger-Jonze Marina’s fleet of vessels just recovered their latest delivery of drugs from the Rojas Cartel.

“What if she liked it, and was good at it? Guess what, she is.” Leah remains conflicted over Etta’s joining the fam’s criminal side-hustle. But their daughter really does have a knack for this, with the ability to apply her quick-thinking skills to unsavory situations. And things are going great until Edward James Olmos shows up as Isaac, the aging cartel kingpin, with his menacing adult sons. Isaac has always trusted Dan and Leah, wants nothing to change with their twenty years of successful operations, once he’s gone. But Mateo (Maurice Compte) and Samuel (Celasco), together with cartel enforcer Elias (Alberto Guerra), have other ideas.

The tone of M.I.A. downshifts aggressively once trouble with the cartel pops off. Etta finds herself adrift, in search of safety and allies. She trusts the wrong people. She takes shots, gets stabbed. She is witness to gators making meals of men. And other horrors. And she might have made it to Miami, but it’s not for the college life her parents envisioned. Let’s just say that by the end of M.I.A.’s first episode, Etta’s boat being named Revenge becomes much more significant.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? In addition to Ozark, Bill Dubuque also wrote the recent His & Hers. M.I.A. also got us thinking about other recent families-and-crime-and-violence outings, such as The Waterfront and Man on Fire. And it shares a certain humid aesthetic and pulpy crime milieu with the Florida-set first season of Bad Monkey.

Our Take: We are really glad Peacock decided to release M.I.A. all at once, because this helps alleviate and straighten the jarring tonal shifts that occur quickly within the first episode. The series covers a lot of expositional and establishing ground in its early going, even beginning with flash-forwards and an omniscient narrator. So having access to the whole bit at once more effectively sets up what could be a ripping underworld yarn, driven by the electric presence of that narrator, Shannon Gisela as Etta Tiger Jonze. We are interested to see how she learns on the job, so to speak, of how to be an avenging angel, maybe with some YouTube tutorials.

We also hope to learn how exactly Etta’s fam got into this crime life. There are hints early, like the mention of relatives estranged…for reasons, and the suggestion of a deeper relationship between Etta’s mom and members of the cartel they deal with. Etta will have a lot to manage as she moves forward, both in the present and as she sorts out her people’s past, and we haven’t even mentioned the cops’ side of things, because some of the only law enforcement we initially meet are themselves dirty. We’re rooting for Etta Tiger Jonez to find her way, make whole what the cartel took from her, and make M.I.A. a fun, high-stakes watch. The guns are already out. The race is on to find out who wins.  

Performance Worth Watching: Like we said, Shannon Gisela has real star quality here.

Sex and Skin: Not so much.

Parting Shot: As the first ep of M.I.A. concludes, if you’re anything like us, you’ll take one quick glance at the scenes from upcoming episodes before remembering “Wait, Peacock is streaming all of them at once.” Binge mode, engage.

Sleeper Star: David Denman gives his typically assured, trustable performance as Dan, Etta’s dad. We also like Brittany Adebumola as Lovely, one of Etta’s new allies.

Most Pilot-y Line: “You wanted to be a part of the family business? Here it is. This is the life. We don’t make choices. We weigh risk, and we live with it.” 

Our Call: Stream It! Built around Shannon Gisela as the Etta Tiger Jonez, M.I.A. offers a compelling central character to follow as it descends into the criminal world undergirding the glitz and glamour of Miami. 

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.