Amazon offers ‘Underground Railroad’
Blending gruesome historical fact with magical realism, the ambitious 10-part series “The Underground Railroad” begins streaming on Amazon Prime. Directed by Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”) and based on the 2016 novel by Colson Whitehead, “Railroad” is as ambitious as television gets. It sets out to illuminate history and spark a conversation about a past that so many seem bent on forgetting or distorting.
It begins in a Georgia plantation where Caesar (Aaron Pierre), a slave from Virginia once promised freedom (or manumission) by his since-deceased owner, begs Cora (Thuso Mbedu) to flee with him to find the legendary Underground Railroad.
Cora’s reluctance to leave the only home she’s ever known abates after the plantation’s owner (Joel Edgerton) executes a captured runaway slave in the most barbaric fashion imaginable. This gruesome ceremony of cruelty is staged amidst a dinner party for his family and friends. Slaves are forced to watch while being read Bible verses admonishing them to obey their masters as they would their Lord.
“Railroad” also dwells on another cruel aspect of slavery, the treatment of African slaves as beasts of burden and “breeding stock.” While other histories have explored the idea that slave owners treated slave women as their sexual conquests, the emphasis here is on how white masters forced men and women to copulate against their will to ensure the best “pedigree.”
Having learned to read while in Virginia, Caesar knows that his education puts his life in danger.
Not to give too much away, but “Underground” follows Caesar and Cora’s odyssey. And this is where the novel and the series depart from history to depict a metaphorical railway, a subterranean transit system out of a dream.
Viewers may have some trouble reconciling a tale so brutal and so formative to our nation’s story with this fantasy. But “Underground,” once seen, is not to be forgotten.
› FX launches “Pride”
(8 p.m., FX, TV-MA), a six-part documentary following the struggle for LGBTQ+ civil rights and visibility. Presented chronologically, it takes a decade-by-decade approach, beginning with a look at gay culture in the years before Stonewall.
Vintage footage and talking heads commentary is complemented by cinematic reenactments of often-forgotten moments, like when during the McCarthy era a U.S. senator shot himself in his office after D.C.
police arrested his son on trumped-up charges of solicitation.
› Streaming today on Netflix, Ewan McGregor stars in the title role of the five-part series “Halston.” Executive produced by Ryan Murphy, this illuminates the life of the designer, who brought fashion to the masses while becoming synonymous with the glitter and excess of the Studio 54 era.