The Underground Railroad (2021)
Dropping onto Amazon Prime this weekend, The Underground Railroad is an imposing 10-hour mothership of event TV. The largest project yet from Moonlight (2016) and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) director Barry Jenkins, itâs an epic imagining of Colson Whiteheadâs Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel about two slaves in the American south who escape their plantation via the ârailroadâ of the title â a clandestine network aiding the liberation of enslaved African-Americans. The great imaginative leap of Whiteheadâs novel was to envision this system as an actual railway, a freedom express, and Jenkinsâ distinctive, in-the-moment lyricism makes a perfect fit to bring this magical realist coup into being on screen. The first episode, a little over an hour long, introduces us to Cora (Thuso Mbedu, a discovery from South African TV) and Caesar (British actor Aaron Pierre) and their life on a Georgia plantation, where the