Stream It Or Skip It?

The Nowhere Man arrives on Starz after premiering in South Africa late last year. The six-episode series stars Bonko Khoza (The Brave Ones) as a man with PTSD, determined to leave his old life behind, who is inevitably pulled back into what he does best. And what does this guy do best? You could try to ask some of the armed-up henchmen an imprisoned drug lord sicced on him, but he killed them all. Easily. “You can keep sending them – I’ll keep killing them.” Now there’s a setup for an action series. The Nowhere Man also stars Naturi Naughton-Lewis, Dineo Rasedile, Nathan Castle, and Moopi Mothibeli.   

Opening Shot: Cape Town, South Africa, where a chopper roars toward the mountains. “This was a really bad idea!” the pilot says, and that’s before he notices the live grenade rolling around in the cockpit. 

The Gist: After that brief flash-forward, we’re brought back to a few months before, and a shelter for women and girls in Johannesburg. Lukas (Khoz) lives a quiet life there, helping Ruby (Naughton-Lewis) run the place, while she helps him put his life back together. We don’t exactly know the full scope of what that means yet, but Lukas is a man for whom brooding seems to follow like a shadow, and pretty quickly, it becomes evident he’s had extensive military training. He would hope to continue to live quietly, help out Ruby, and bond with a little girl at the shelter who also harbors lasting trauma. But even Ruby notes the large-format metalwork sculptures he fashions in the shelter’s basement all depict predator animals. Deep down, he knows what he is.  

One day, when Lukas meets Neo (Rasedile) by chance, he doesn’t want to get involved in her problems. But it’s like he tells Ruby. “It doesn’t matter how hard I try, I always end up in the same place.” Reluctantly, he becomes Neo’s bodyguard. And boy does she need one. Her ex, Phumza (Mothibeli), is a violent drug dealer she agreed to help put away, and now he’s sending wave after wave (after wave) of gunmen to silence her once and for all. 

And protecting Neo isn’t the only new trouble suddenly on Lukas’s plate. The opening shot glimpse of what’s to come in The Nowhere Man suggests a further reemergence of his particular set of skills, networks of criminality beyond Phumza’s scheming, and the realization that what saddled Lukas with post-traumatic stress in the first place was never dead and gone, never buried as deep, as he desperately wanted to believe. 

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? “Nowhere Man” has been a Beatles song, the title of a few novels, and most recently, Nowhere Man, which was Netflix’s first Mandarin-language series. As for The Nowhere Man, it marks a return to Starz for Naturi Naughton-Lewis, who played Tasha St. Patrick across the crime universe of Power and Power Book II: Ghost.

Our Take: Look, we’ve all seen lots of versions of what The Nowhere Man is working with. The old “every time I get out, they pull me back in” line, this time applied to a man who seems to understand, no matter how many sparks fly from the very cool sculptures he fabricates featuring sea creatures and jungle predators, he’ll always return to what he truly knows. He was trained to do violence, and it turned him into an instrument of death. But while the format of this series is familiar, it’s still got legs, and in Nowhere, Bonko Khoza plays Lukas with certainty, whether he’s allowing Ruby to see the darkest parts of his soul, or dispatching the gun-toting thugs chasing Neo without an ounce of compunction. 

We also like Khoza’s chemistry with Dineo Rasedile; it’s a good reason to stick with them as they find themselves on the run. And what Nowhere Man isn’t yet showing us about Lukas’s history with the military seems sure to break open with even more of the violent streak this series quickly establishes. The villains in this thing are the kind you love to hate – and Lukas is exactly the kind of relentless guy they hate to see coming. We’ll be happy to watch him work.

Performance Worth Watching: As Phumza, a powerful, imprisoned drug dealer, Moopi Mothibeli nails the right amount of untouchable menace, and a sophistication that barely contains willingness to kill. 

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the early going, anyway.

Parting Shot: When we see how Neo fought back against Phumza’s controlling, abusive nature, we understand how a guy wired like him isn’t gonna leave her alone.

Sleeper Star: And then you throw a cute kid side-plot into the mix, an innocent who never did nothing to nobody, and who looks to Lukas for comfort in a world turned sour? Pile it on, The Nowhere Man. Even more reason for our guy to go ham on protecting the people he’s closest to.

Most Pilot-y Line: “We don’t live in a quiet world,” Ruby tells Lukas. “We have to face the noise – it’s just how it is.”

Our Call: Stream It. The Nowhere Man isn’t breaking new ground for an action series, but it rides that wave of familiarity well, punctuates its quieter moments with shoot-em-up action, and features a nice bit of chemistry between the leads.  

How To Watch The Nowhere Man

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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.