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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
36
Mixed:
0
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
TV Guide MagazineMay 21, 2021
May 14, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The most worthwhile 10 episodes of TV given to us in a long while. ... "The Underground Railroad" is a massive accomplishment and a weighty one, and not to be rushed. Even if you absorb it all at once, parsing its pathways and traveling with it for time seems inevitable, and I suspect we'll be talking about this for a while.
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May 14, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Empathy and closeness radiates from the screen. ... The lead performances from relative newcomers Mbedu and Pierre are transporting. ... Jenkins is renowned for his nuance, subtlety and meditative silences, and those qualities transfer to television, with each episode of the series resembling a short film — beautiful cinematography, carefully considered locations, meticulous sets and wardrobe.
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The GuardianMay 14, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Mbedu – already a star in her native South Africa – is extraordinary, and embedded in an extraordinary adaptation: hallucinatory, magical, allegorical and yet permanently in the pursuit of historical and eternal truths, the resurrection of lost perspectives and the uplifting of unheard voices. Watch it, but slowly, one complex, virtuosic, heartbreaking episode at a time.
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May 13, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The story moves at the director’s pace, and much of this 10-part Amazon series is deliriously, cinematically beautiful despite the context. ... He conjures visual poetry where there should be none, with all the consequent exhilaration that artistic aspiration delivers.
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May 13, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The Underground Railroad made me feel things about my own life and personal pain very deeply, while never letting me forget that while I could relate to aspects of this story, it is not my own. ... The show’s achievement is making every episode feel so full as to allow you to watch an individual installment, walk away for a while feeling like you’ve got a complete story, then return when you’re ready for another story featuring some of the same characters.
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May 13, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Breathtaking. ... Jenkins uses the medium of serialized television to open up its layers, transcending the specifics of place and period. With roughly two minutes of screen time for every page of text, he’s able to reproduce the book’s most resonant monologues but also insert long, wordless, lyrical passages that communicate characters’ inner lives more elegantly and completely than the voiceover narration so many literary adaptations lean on.
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May 13, 2021IndieWireMay 12, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Jenkins’ trademark patience behind the camera builds romance and passion with powerful precision, establishing unique individual identities while fleshing out each subject, no matter how many scenes they get. ... Before the final needle drop, it’s impossible not to feel closer to this world and everyone in it.
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The IndependentMay 12, 2021
PolygonMay 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
By showing the joy and laughter, the love and determination, mixed with the horrors, Jenkins turns historical slaves away from being suffering props for white consumption, and gives them dignity. In Thuso Mbedu’s resolute, sincere turn as Cora, she fills us with an equally unfathomable grace.
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May 5, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Both the novel and series transcend blunt allegory with a haunting magical realism that openly embraces the horrors of slavery in America. Whitehead’s prose is engaging, but Jenkins’ visuals are searing. ... Each installment feels complete and satisfying, which is good because the story’s intensity doesn’t lend itself to binge watching.
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The PlaylistMay 4, 2021
Season 1 Review:
'Underground Railroad' solidifies itself as the kind of adult black-originated drama that is not only needed but we are seeing more of. It is not a Marvel crowd pleaser. It is far from the polished thrills that have made trending topics their master. But it unapologetically never tries to be. And never needs to be.
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The Daily BeastMay 14, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Underground Railroad is not a perfect adaptation despite how meticulously crafted it is in certain areas. ... Regardless of its imperfections, Jenkins’ vision is still executed in a thoughtful, incisive way that will hopefully serve as a blueprint for more shows and films like it in the future.
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May 4, 2021
Season 1 Review:
It all results in a show that's a challenging, binge-worthy interplay of standalone incidents, look-away unpleasantness that demands full immersion, denied emotional payoffs and unexpected catharsis. It's a tough book to capture, but Jenkins has risen to the occasion.
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May 14, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The final frame of the pilot challenges your notion on how the rest of this journey will go. ... These two slaves are going to be free at some point, but what they will encounter on their way north will create enough tension and empathy to keep viewers’ attention beyond the first episode.
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May 12, 2021
Season 1 Review:
It’s Jenkins’s first major project for television, and he plays with the form in ways that don’t always work — the middle sections of this epic sag like a country bridge. But when “Railroad” comes together, it exerts a dramatic force that puts it close to the great narratives of race in America.
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May 4, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Not everyone will want to devote 10 hours to watching America’s worst instincts come to grisly fruition, no matter how thoughtfully told — which is fair, especially if you’re Black and understand them all too well. But those who join Cora and Jenkins on this exploration may find themselves enveloped in a story about slaves told unlike many others: one which doesn’t shy away from its truth, but which nevertheless has the compassion to make its suffering more three-dimensional than the shock of a scream.
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May 4, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Jenkins excels at a dreamy state of intimacy, but the allegorical setting can turn distancing. ... The better later hours veer into an all-Black community, so utopian it's on a vineyard, where personal dramas turn political. There's suddenly a large supporting cast, which adds a new depth to the dramatic complexity, as different characters struggle against racism and oppression in diametrically opposed ways.
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May 14, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Jenkins’s storytelling, for all its surprising boldness (like the back-to-back episodes “Fanny Briggs” and “Indiana Autumn” that run 19 and then 70 minutes, respectively) and the stunning geography the camera captures, sometimes acts like that blinding light, pulling focus toward itself instead of the characters.
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May 18, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Awful...A sci-fi fantasy vision of slavery and race relations, the TV version of The Underground Railroad is an incoherent mess of artistic pretension, full of scenes that are not under-lit but un-lit, nonsensical soliloquys with neither symbolic nor literal value (why would a slave recite lines from Gulliver's Travels to a young woman just beaten nearly to death by the plantation owner?) and surreal flashbacks that only further trash what is a very tentative narrative.
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