Underground

Underground benefits from its deliberate pacing. This is, after all, a heist story, except that the thieves are literally stealing their own bodies. All the components of a tense thriller are here.

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.

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.

Good newcomer that can drag, but Hemingway's direction keeps this one on track.

Based on the four episodes I've watched, Underground seems to have hit the sweet spot between quality and commercial potential, and between being respectful of the time it's depicting while finding a way to function as ongoing entertainment.

As of its first four episodes, Underground is in a solid position moving forward, thanks to its breathless momentum and wonderful anchoring performances from Hodge, Smollett-Bell, Vann, and Miller in particular.

Underground celebrates the small, exceptional group of black and white heroes who risked it all for the sake of freedom. And it’s that story, the amazing cast and the historically accurate writing behind the drama that make this series worth the investment.

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.

WGN America's new drama Underground is an excellent program that's both engaging and disturbing.

Thrilling and occasionally provocative.

Underground, another well-made show from the underappreciated network WGN America, is at its best when it’s hardest to watch.

Even if Underground isn't fun, the Misha Green and Joe Pokaski-created series is both exhilarating and entertaining, taking a history lesson and making it something more contemporary, taking a painful chapter in American life and infusing it with populist genres.

Underground rises to the challenge with urgent storytelling and a heavy dose of contemporary edge.

Underground is a rough watch, but it offers twists and compelling characters worth watching for viewers up to the challenge.

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.

An intriguing historical drama. [11 Mar 2016, p.77]

The plot is filled with what might be considered melodramatic cliches.... But a funny thing happens after the first episode or two: "Underground" ... loses its melodramatic patina. That’s almost entirely because of the performances.

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.

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.

They [the black characters] are so well drawn and acted and so dramatically compelling that the others--like the casually cruel plantation massah and the kindly abolitionist lawyer and his wife--can seem like stock characters in a movie of the week.

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]

Against all convention, Underground could even be flashier. A tighter vision, though, is what will make its flash burn brighter.

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.

But for all its dramatic pulse, historic details and narrative twists, Underground simply takes too long to get going; it isn't until the fourth episode that the show's real story, and potential, reveal themselves.

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.

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.