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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
26
Mixed:
6
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Mar 7, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The writers do take the occasional misstep along the trail. The series has it didactic moments, to be sure, as well as the occasional cartoonish character (usually among those chasing the runaways). But these drawbacks are more than offset by the riveting narrative, the outstanding lead cast and a seamless weaving of the greater historical context into the ongoing story.
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Mar 9, 2016
Season 1 Review:
With scenes of brutality inflicted on slaves and the casual use of the “n” word, Underground can be difficult to watch. But there’s nothing gratuitous about this story. The series is enhanced by contemporary music from the likes of Legend, Kanye West and The Weeknd.
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Mar 9, 2016
Mar 9, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Sometimes the action veers into melodrama, and some of its white characters feel cartoonish. The level of violence is sometimes hard to watch, especially in the first episode, and the language is very rough, if appropriately so. But the characters of the slaves are sharply drawn, the action riveting and the mood not always grim. Hodge and Smollett-Bell are magical together. All that makes Underground an important series that doesn't feel like medicine going down.
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Mar 7, 2016
Uncle BarkyMar 8, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Underground occasionally clunks through these proceedings but usually not for too long. Vivid, strong performances by Hodge and Meloni help to keep the story on its toes while the producers effectively recreate a pivotal period just four years shy of the four-year war pitting North against South.
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Mar 7, 2016
Season 1 Review:
An intriguing historical drama. [11 Mar 2016, p.77]
Mar 9, 2016
Season 1 Review:
While the scripts set up and execute various clever twists, they aren’t clever enough to allay concerns that the show is trying so hard to reassure viewers that they aren’t being force-fed a meal of high-fiber historical fiction that it’s overcompensating with eye candy.... It’s a gripping series but far from a great one, and there are bound to be more like it; in a roundabout way, this is progress.
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Mar 9, 2016
Season 1 Review:
At its best, the show does a good job of portraying each slave as an individual with his or her own strengths and flaws, while, on the other side, the whites are also placed in the social context of the times.... There are some jarring touches in Underground. One of them is good: the use of contemporary music by artists such as Kanye West to underscore bristling discontent. But another contemporary trope occasionally takes a viewer out of the drama, as when one character or another sometimes uses phrases that no 19th-century person would have uttered.
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TV Guide MagazineMar 3, 2016
Season 1 Review:
These runaways aren't shown to be saints, but their treacherous quest for liberation has an almost biblical quality of deliverance. [7-10 Mar 2016, p.18]
ColliderMar 9, 2016
Season 1 Review:
What truly sets the series apart from similar narratives, however, is its narrative breadth, its not entirely successful but nevertheless enthralling scope in detailing the world of the pre-Lincoln south, from the white men and women who rose to power by enslaving persecuting, and, yes, killing African-Americans to those African-Americans who sacrificed, in every imaginable way, to survive the times.
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Mar 8, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Underground lingers on the slave experience, and that experience is appropriately awful and inhumane and certainly dramatic. But it’s also a show that wanders a bit too freely, undercutting its important subject matter and forward momentum by interfering with itself. As a show, it needs to learn how to keep it together.
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Mar 9, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Underground’s provocative premise is shortchanged by a corny and anxious tendency to goose the narrative. It is hard to imagine a more inherently gripping premise than escaping slaves, but Underground tosses in pop music, lurid sex scenes, and a breakneck pace, undermining its own ambition.
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Mar 7, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The result is so-so as both history and drama, a series with moments of power, but also occasional lapses into Civil War-era cliches. Progressing along a serialized path, the WGN drama contains enough suspense to pull viewers through four previewed episodes, without yet demonstrating whether it can stay on track through a 10-episode run.
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