Harriet Tubman goes solo in ‘Underground’ special episode today
NEW YORK—Harriet Tubman, who escaped from slavery in the antebellum South to become a leading abolitionist, is best known today as a righteous figure and the future face on the $20 bill.
But for viewers of “Underground” this season, Tubman has come to life as a character on this drama about the treacherous journey to freedom along a secret network of safe houses that came to be called the Underground Railroad.
Now Tubman is the focus of something special, even unprecedented in episodic TV, with this week’s “Underground” episode. It will pause its overarching narrative for a night to let Tubman tell her own story in the form of a solo performance. More specifically, Aisha Hinds, who this season has portrayed Tubman, will deliver a powerful, passionate episode-length oration channeling Tubman.
For Hinds, it was “an honor and a call to duty.” The episode will premiere on WGN America today at 7 p.m. CDT, with back-to-back repeats continuing through a replay at 12 a.m. CDT.
The episode is set in what appears to be a remote barn or storage shed where, some night in the late 1850s, a couple dozen sympathizers have gathered furtively to hear from this champion of freedom.
The script, written by series co-creator Misha Green and Joe Pokaski, draws on Tubman’s history and words.
Tubman calls slavery “the next thing to hell” and likens the taste of it to “all your teeth made of copper.”
Born into slavery at its most brutal extreme, she speaks of how initially she “spent all my time knowing things instead of believing them. And that’s the first step to truly being free, when you can see past all the things that you know and believe something better. It ain’t easy, but that’s the work that must be done.”
Stirringly Tubman recounts the work that won her freedom when finally she crossed the line into Pennsylvania. But the work wasn’t done once she escaped. Over and over, she returned to the South to lead others to safety.
“There ain’t no negotiations on freedom,” she declares. “Big or small, there ain’t no compromises, no half-measures .. Cause a country built on bodies will always need more for the slaughter.”
This remarkable episode was shot, like the rest of “Underground,” in Savannah, Georgia. Despite airing as the sixth of the 10-episode season, it was the last episode shot, during the final three days before production wrapped last November.
“Usually an episode would take six to eight days,” notes Hinds, who received the first half of the 45-page script just 10 days beforehand, and the other half a few days later.