The Barry Jenkins Amazon series saves perhaps its most poignant story for its final episode
Phil Owen | May 15, 2021 @ 10:48 AM
Amazon Prime Video
(This article contains spoilers for the finale of “The Underground Railroad” on Amazon Prime Video)
Throughout the ten episodes of Barry Jenkins’s “The Underground Railroad” on Amazon, Cora (Thuso Mbedu) often thinks about her mother, Mabel.
Mabel (Sheila Atim) is out of the picture before the series begins. As the story goes, she ran away from the Randall plantation where she and Cora had spent their whole lives when Cora was young. And she got away, apparently the slave catcher Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton) says Mabel was the only slave who’s run away from Randall that he wasn’t able to catch.
Is Amazon’s ‘The Underground Railroad’ Based on a True Story?
The stunning epic tale from Oscar winner Barry Jenkins certainly has its roots in historical events, but did this specific story happen?
Phil Owen | May 13, 2021 @ 5:53 PM
Amazon Prime Video
It’s only been four years since Barry Jenkins emphatically put his stamp on Hollywood with “Moonlight,” and now he’s putting his stamp on the world of television with the Amazon series “The Underground Railroad,” adapted from the Pulitzer-winning novel of the same name by Colson Whitehead.
Jenkins directed all ten episodes of the series, and it shows “The Underground Railroad” is a masterpiece. It tells the story of a young slave named Cora (Thuso Mbedu) who escapes a plantation in Georgia and makes a long, arduous journey across several states while being pursued by a dogged slave catcher named Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton).
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When Colson Whitehead sat down to write “The Underground Railroad,” the 2016 novel about two escaped slaves that would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, he knew the literary journey wouldn t be easy.
“It’s daunting to put your characters through the kind of brutality that telling a truthful story about the topic requires,” he said at the time.
Writer-director Barry Jenkins, who has adapted Whitehead’s book into a 10-part Amazon series that premieres on Friday, May 14, faced an equally difficult cinematic task: he not only had to convert the horrors that Whitehead imagined in his words into visual images for the screen, but also ask his actors to perform them.
The Underground Railroad is just one of the gems on TV tonight…
There’s hard-hitting drama coming to Amazon Prime in The Underground Railroad, Gregg Wallace is on a Big Weekend Away in the Greek capital and there’s singing and dancing galore as the second series of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series drops on Disney+. Here’s what you shouldn’t miss on TV tonight.
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The Underground Railroad Review: Thuso Mbedu infuses her role with empathy and humanity, captures both terror and tenderness. Joel Edgerton's is a powerful presence. Chase W. Dillon is a consummate scene-stealer.