To Kill A Monkey Has Eight AMVCA Nominations. The More Interesting Question Is What Kemi Adetiba Does Next.

Television · Analysis

To Kill A Monkey arrived on Netflix in mid-2025. Eight episodes, created, written, directed, and produced by Kemi Adetiba alongside her brother Remi Adetiba under Kemi Adetiba Visuals. The series follows Efemini — a programmer who reconnects with an old friend and finds himself drawn into a world of cybercrime, fraud, and moral compromise. William Benson leads. Bucci Franklin plays the criminal infrastructure that makes Efemini’s compromise possible. Bimbo Akintola, Stella Damasus, Chidi Mokeme, Teniola Aladese, and Lilian Afegbai fill the ensemble. It received eight AMVCA nominations. By any conventional measure, it was a success.

The critical conversation around it has been more complicated, and the complications are worth naming honestly because Adetiba is a filmmaker whose work demands honest criticism.

King of Boys arrived in 2018 and changed the grammar of Nigerian crime drama. It was operatic, detailed, and structurally rigorous — a story about power told with the specific intelligence of someone who understood that power is maintained through systems, not individuals, and that when those systems crack, the consequences are operatic precisely because of how long they were held in place. The film’s influence on what followed — on what Nigerian crime drama thinks it is allowed to be, on the visual and tonal ambitions of the genre — is still visible in 2026.

To Kill A Monkey is the work of the same filmmaker, and the gap between what King of Boys achieved and what this series reaches is the central critical question. The series is well-made in the ways Adetiba’s work is always well-made: the cinematography is controlled, the cast is directed with precision, the production values are premium. What is less clear is what the series has to say about the specific crime it depicts. Cybercrime fraud in Nigeria is not an abstract moral problem — it is a specific social phenomenon with specific psychology, specific economic roots, and specific human consequences for both perpetrators and victims. The series gestures at these dimensions but does not fully inhabit them. Efemini’s internal conflict is rendered as dramatic tension rather than genuine moral inquiry. Eight episodes is enough runtime to do both. To Kill A Monkey does one.

This is not a dismissal of what the series achieved. Bucci Franklin’s performance is the best work of his career and the AMVCA nomination is correct. The series reached the audience it was made for and generated the cultural conversation that ambitious Nigerian television is supposed to generate. Lilian Afegbai’s widely discussed reaction to her AMVCA snub — and subsequent public apology — was itself a measure of how much visibility the series created for everyone in its cast.

What the eight nominations and the Netflix success should not obscure is the question of what Adetiba does with the next project. A filmmaker of her ambition and demonstrated capability is only as interesting as the standard she sets for herself. King of Boys set a standard. To Kill A Monkey operated at a level below it. The industry will be watching what comes after — and what comes after should be the proof that she is not finished raising the bar, only resting between attempts.

To Kill A Monkey — now streaming on Netflix. Created, written, directed and produced by Kemi Adetiba · Kemi Adetiba Visuals · Eight AMVCA 2026 nominations including Best Series.