‘The Underground Railroad’: TV Review
Daniel Fienberg
With his Amazon adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s prize-winning novel
The Underground Railroad,
Moonlight director Barry Jenkins walks confidently, if perhaps unintentionally, into the ongoing debate about Black-created/led movies and TV shows that center Black trauma. That debate has reached a fever pitch in recent months with small-screen offerings like
Late in this
Underground Railroad, a character approaches a roving poet with a simple and sad request: “If I gave you my sorrows, would you make them sound pretty?”
Directing all 10 installments, most running over an hour, Jenkins indeed makes a wide range of sadness beautiful, doing the same for strains of trauma and rays of joyful light. By nature of its subject matter,