The Long Song Disrupts PBS Masterpiece s Typical Slate By Putting Black Characters First: TV Review
Caroline Framke, provided by
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Courtesy of BBC/Carlos Rodriguez
“The Long Song” knows what an audience might expect from a period drama airing on the BBC, as it did in the UK in 2018, or under the PBS Masterpiece banner, as it will in the US starting on January 31. The camera, helmed with a steady hand by director Mahalia Belo, pans across still life scenes of porcelain curios and rumpled silks in a manse surrounded by gently swaying palm trees. “The life of a white missus on a Jamaican plantation,” a narrator (Doña Croll) intones, “be surely full of tribulation from the scarcity of beef to the want of a fashionable hat.” Within seconds, the piercing screech of that “white missus” shatters the idyllic scene, and the acidic streak of sarcasm laden in the narrator’s words comes more clearly into focus. “If that be the story you want to hea
Tamara Lawrance stars as an indomitable house slave in Jamaica during the era of emancipation, with Hayley Atwell as her demanding, capricious mistress, in “The Long Song,” a miniseries in three parts beginning Sunday, Jan. 31, 2021, on WGCU PBS.
Based on the award-winning novel by Andrea Levy, the miniseries airs through February 14, 2021, at 10 pm.
The British press applauded the UK broadcast of “The Long Song,” with The
Guardian calling it “a beautiful, moving, horrifying adaptation of Levy’s
unsimple tale, that honors the source and its subject.” The Radio Times
judged it “so finely-tuned and carefully-balanced that it’ll break your heart
January 22, 2021
Masterpiece miniseries premieres Sunday, January 31 at 10 p.m. on THIRTEEN
Set on a sugarcane plantation during the end of slavery in 19th century Jamaica, the
Masterpiece miniseries
King Charles III), a young enslaved woman with an indomitable spirit, and her detestable mistress, Caroline Mortimer (Hayley Atwell,
The Avengers).
Their lives change with the arrival of the charming new overseer, Robert Goodwin (Jack Lowden,
Dunkirk), who sets out to improve the plantation. The drama unfolds during the transition from slavery to freedom in Jamaica and is an adaptation of Caribbean British writer Andrea Levy’s fifth novel, which won the Walter Scott award and was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.
The Long Song on Masterpiece, Part 1 azpbs.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from azpbs.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
El desastre de Annual y otras citas lectoras del año que arranca elpais.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from elpais.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.