ABC drama thoughtfully made and necessarily difficult viewing
The brutal 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till while visiting family in Mississippi, the subsequent trial of his killers, who were acquitted, and specifically the experiences and decision-making by his mother Mamie Till-Mobley are the focus of a new multipart series airing on ABC over three weeks called “Women of the Movement,” which recently premiered and airs Thursdays. Additionally, each week the broadcast of the show (scripted and performed by a cast) will be followed by a companion docuseries produced by ABC News called “Let the World See,” offering deeper historical context.
Till’s violent, disfiguring death would become a galvanizing touchstone in the civil rights movement, largely because of the determined efforts of his mother to ensure Americans saw and understood the reality of what happened to her son.
“Women of the Movement” doesn’t succeed in shedding new light on the story, though it is thoughtfully made and devastating, enraging and necessarily difficult viewing. It also has an unmistakable Hollywood smoothness to it that sometimes feels at odds with the tenor of the story itself. Created by Marissa Jo Cerar and based on two books — “Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America” by Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson and “Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the
Civil Rights Movement” by Devery S. Anderson — the show is written, filmed and scored in a traditional style of miniseries that hearkens back the ’70s and ’80s. I would have been curious to see a stylistically more cinematic — or rawer — approach to the material, but it’s possible that would have been deemed too much of a risk for broadcast television.
Jay-Z and Will Smith are among the show’s producers and the performances are first rate, with Cedric Joe as the charming, gregarious Emmett Till, Adrienne Warren as Mamie Till-Mobley and Tonya Pinkins as Till-Mobley’s mother Alma Carthan, who has real concerns about the dangers of speaking out and is wary of seeing her daughter’s grief exploited. Some of the strongest portions of the series portray the organizing power of civil rights activists and particularly the efforts of Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a Mississippi surgeon and activist who opened his home as a safe harbor to Till-Mobley, Black journalists covering the story and members of the NAACP, including the wonderfully no-nonsense and clever Ruby Hurley (a role woefully underwritten,
especially for a series with the title “Women of the Movement”) played here by Leslie Silva.
Warren is so good throughout, especially when swallowing down a hundred different emotions while betraying none of them outwardly. But too often the script struggles to capture a sense of her own interiority as it shifts from that of a protective mother to a woman with the wherewithal in her grief to strategize ways to fight every effort to erase her son’s initial disappearance and eventual murder. She does these things but we see little of that internal emotional reckoning, from private person to public figure.
The companion docuseries “Let the World See” (the title is a reference Till-Mobley’s insistence on an open casket to expose the viciousness inflicted upon her son) includes interviews with Till’s cousins, including Rev. Wheeler Parker, who was there the night of the abduction. And it contains information that might be new to some viewers, including the circumstances surrounding the death of Louis Till (Emmett’s father) that unnervingly mirrors his son’s fate.