The Underground Railroad is a new Amazon prime drama directed by Jenkins (
Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk) based on the 1999 best-selling book written by
Colson Whitehead. Over the 10-episode inaugural season you follow Cora Randall, a young woman who escapes Georgia slavery only to go on a harrowing journey through a re-imagined 19
th century America to find freedom.
Without question,
The Underground Railroad is beautifully filmed, and for the most part well acted. The show also manages to do something that I never thought possible.
The Underground Railroad, somehow, despite the brutality, terror and suspense, manages to make the whole institution of slavery boring.
The underground railroad here is not the historical “railroad,” which was a network of people, African American as well as white, offering assistance to slaves escaping from the South.
If Beale Street Could Talk) adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of the same name for this limited series, which chronicles Cora Randall, a runaway slave, and her journey for freedom in the antebellum South. In it, the underground railroad is reimagined into a literal locomotive that runs underground, stopping at different stations to transport Black slaves to freedom. The series incorporates fantasy, which helps alleviate the trauma of some of the harsher scenes and gives the viewer time to recuperate before continuing through the story. The first episode is a difficult one to digest, especially for Black viewers, filled with similar themes one would expect to see in stories of slavery a whipping, a slave being burned alive. However, Jenkins deviates from the trauma porn norm of bloody torment to also portray Black resilience, Black love, and Black joy. Being mindful of everyone s mental health on set, Jenkins brought on a team of therapists to help the actor