Review: You don’t need to understand Jonasi Gomora from ‘The Polygamist’, you just need to survive him

June 15, 2026 · Citizen

Show: The Polygamist
Rating: 4/5
Where to watch: Netflix

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The Polygamist opens with a funeral. Jonasi Gomora is dead, and the women who loved him (or endured him, or both) are assembled in their mourning blacks.

I thought this was a masterful cold open because it immediately reframes the question the viewer will spend 22 episodes asking. Not: “Who killed him?” Rather: “How did it come to this?”

Netflix’s first South African supernovela, adapted from Sue Nyathi’s 2012 debut novel by showrunner Akin Omotoso and head writer Busisiwe Zwane, earns its distinction. The production values are unmistakably premium. It does not look and feel like the telenovelas of yesteryear, shot on a tight turnaround. This supernovela is definitely more elevated and expensive-looking.

Stained Glass Productions, the company behind Uzalo and The Wife, brings its signature storytelling to a project that signals Netflix’s intent to stake a territorial claim in a genre it has historically left to others.

Oh, Jonasi!

Sue Nyathi’s readers know and dislike Jonasi Gomora. Now, Sdumo Mtshali may have to contend with being called Jonasi for the next decade.

He embodied the role so fully that he became the recipient of viewers’ anger for depicting a man charming enough that you understand the pull, yet reckless enough that you dread what is coming.

Gugu Gumede’s Joyce, his formidable first wife, is equally compelling. Viewers immediately understand that she is a woman who has decided that controlling the narrative is the closest thing to power she will ever be granted in her marriage. But, you also spend the season wishing she would just leave that man!

Let there be sex

The sex scenes have inspired loud objections from a portion of the local audience. In The Polygamist, the sex scenes are not incidental or even sensationalist.

In a story like this, they are the point.

The production’s central argument is that Jonasi’s behaviour is not simply infidelity or even the contested terrain of isithembu, but something closer to compulsion. Watching Mtshali’s portrayal of the main character feels like watching an inability, or refusal, to exercise any discipline over his appetites whatsoever.

To soften, or even remove, those scenes would be to soften the indictment. The show is not interested in being gentle about what Jonasi costs the people around him.

If you’re a person who is uncomfortable with the portrayal of sex on screen, rest assured that the scenes are not explicit and are usually over quickly. And the fast-forward button is always right there when you need it.

Not always monstrous but definitely deceptive

We meet Jonasi and Joyce at a particularly brutal point in their marriage, one in which his initial contempt for her is barely disguised. The flashbacks that reveal what things were like when they were good are genuinely useful: they clarify that this is a story about deterioration, not a story about a man who was always monstrous, even though he has always been deceptive.

The episodes are short and this pacing decision echoes what worked so well in The Wife on Showmax. The result is that the show clips along without the padding that can make high-episode-count productions feel like homework. Most viewers, understandably, binged it within 24 to 48 hours, which is why the show has been trending on social media all weekend.

Jonasi’s daughter, Mpume, played with striking assurance and emerges as the moral conscience of the piece. No character in the show holds Jonasi accountable with more consistency or less sentimentality. This stood out to me considering who young women in African households that follow traditional values are raised to be.

The wrong question?

Around the sixth episode of The Polygamist, a nagging question begins to form: why is Jonasi like this? What happened to him? What does he actually want? It is the question any engaged viewer will ask, and it is also, I came to believe, the wrong question.

I put it to Mtshali directly during a press junket with the cast, and he said that he found his way into the character not through explanation but through empathy; not judging Jonasi for his choices, and understanding that the show was asking something real and uncomfortable about a particular kind of man, about who we put on pedestals and what those figures cost us when they fall.

He spoke about accountability to viewers, about the responsibility of an artist to portray something true even when it is difficult. It is a thoughtful answer, and it reframes the problem.

The Polygamist is, at its core, a consequence study.

Real but not reality

The show is not especially interested in excavating the wound that made Jonasi who he is, and arguably, it should not be. Because the damage he inflicts does not become more or less real depending on whether we can trace it to a comprehensible origin. His wives, his children, the women orbiting his life; they bear the weight of his choices regardless of what caused those choices. The show’s refusal to over-explain him is a structural decision that keeps the focus precisely where it belongs: on everyone else.

This is, ultimately, as I stated in my first article on the show, closer to Big Little Lies than to lifestyle documentary or reality TV series.

Nyathi’s source novel was never a celebration of polygamy, and neither is this adaptation. It is an interrogation – of power, of the costs love extracts from women who have built their lives around men who do not deserve that architecture, and of the particular violence of a patriarchy that runs on charm and money.

The Polygamist is streaming now on Netflix.

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