There’s no mistaking the mission statement of Washington Black. “This just ain’t his story. It’s our story,” narrates Sterling K. Brown’s Medwin in the opening moments, invoking themes of family, courage and inspiration. As a framing, it feels old-fashioned in style and didactic in tone, grand in ambition but also curiously limiting: Before we’ve even had a chance to meet the titular protagonist, he’s already been burdened with the responsibility of representation.
Luckily, Wash (Ernest Kingsley Jr.) has never been one to put too much stock in the rules of gravity anyway. While Hulu’s adaptation of Esi Edugyan’s Booker-shortlisted 2018 novel never fully shakes that self-seriousness, it eventually reveals itself to be a surprisingly fleet adventure, as buoyant and unpredictable as its hero’s own globe-trotting travels.
Washington Black
The Bottom Line
Weighty themes, buoyant heart.
Airdate: Wednesday, July 23 (Hulu)
Cast: Ernest Kingsley Jr., Sterling K. Brown, Tom Ellis, Eddie Karanja, Iola Evans, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Rupert Graves, Edward Bluemel
Creator: Selwyn Seyfu Hinds
Selwyn Seyfu Hinds’ miniseries starts, if not quite at the end of Wash’s journey, somewhere deep into it. We first pick up with George Washington Black, as he’s formally called, or “Jack Crawford,” as he identifies himself in hiding, as a 19-year-old in 1837. His life in Halifax, Nova Scotia — the last stop on the Underground Railroad, we’re reminded — seems humble but relatively contented. He makes enough money working the docks to rent a modest room from the affectionately stern Medwin, dreams up exciting new inventions in his free time and, within the first five minutes of the Wanuri Kahiu-directed premiere, falls fast and hard for Tanna (Iola Evans), an upper-class Brit new to these shores.
But his story properly begins eight years earlier on a Barbados sugar plantation, where as an 11-year-old (Eddie Karanja) he has a fateful meeting with Titch (Tom Ellis), the scientist brother of his cruel enslaver (Julian Rhind-Tutt). Intrigued by the boy’s curiosity and impressed by his obvious intelligence, Titch enlists his help in constructing a “cloud cutter,” a proto-blimp of Titch’s own design. Eventually, in a moment of crisis, Titch also escapes with him on it, kicking off what will become a wild continent-hopping odyssey.
Cutting between the two timelines, Washington Black bears witness simultaneously to the very first steps in Wash’s adolescent coming-of-age, and the finishing stages of it. But the need to derive a clear and profound meaning from every facet of his saga proves more of a drag than it does a blessing. While Medwin’s voiceover thankfully ceases after that first scene, a heavy-handed score serves much the same purpose, prodding us toward big and obvious emotions rather than contrasting or highlighting them.
The story flies by in a blur, pausing long enough at each stop for Wash to internalize whatever life lesson fate has in store for him, but not for us to get any specific feel for these locations and the people within them. They’re symbols and metaphors, rather than worlds unto themselves, and the lived-in intimacy of similarly roving shows like Amazon’s The Underground Railroad or (in a very different mood) Peacock’s Poker Face is sorely missed. With such a broad yet shallow scope, Washington Black occasionally takes on the dutiful feel of an educational video.
Still, for a fictionalized history lesson, it’s fun one, full of surprising twists and charming turns. If Wash’s romance with Tanna, a white-passing biracial woman chafing under the future laid out for her by her father (Rupert Graves), initially feels reverse-engineered from statements the show wants to make about inequities and those with the courage to defy them, Kingsley and Evans are so sweet together that we can’t help but root for them.
And if characters like tender Kit, the closest Wash has to a mother on the plantation, or Nat Turner, who models for him a more militant form of rebellion, don’t stick around as long as we hope, Shaunette Renée Wilson and Jamie Hector (respectively) make big impressions in limited timeframes.
Meanwhile, Brown’s typically excellent performance helps to elevate Medwin into a formidable figure in his own right — though one hopes we’ll get more insight into the nuances of his nigh-paternal relationship with Wash in the second half of the season. (Critics were given four of eight hour-long episodes.)
Washington Black is at its most intriguing when it’s least straightforward, and most willing to embrace complications. Take its portrayal of Titch, a queasily ambiguous figure. Here is a white man whose supposed commitment to abolitionism extends to treating his brother’s slaves with unusual kindness, but not to refraining from using them for his own ends. His friendship with Wash defies simplistic categorization: While sincere in feeling, its inherently untenable contradictions amount to a ticking time bomb, apparently destined to blow up in the back half of the series.
The more experiences the young Wash accumulates, the more affecting and engaging the drama becomes. Through Karanja’s wide-eyed performance, we watch as the child takes everything in, processing what all of these adults are telling him and noticing what they don’t. We see how he recalibrates his perspective with every new pearl of wisdom, stringing them together bit by bit into a comprehensive understanding of himself, the universe and his place in it.
And in Kingsley’s portrayal, we see what kind of man all of these lessons might eventually make. I may have wished, occasionally, that Wash had been allowed more room to just be his own idiosyncratic self, rather than a stand-in for bigger, loftier themes. But credit where it’s due: With each passing chapter, the truth of Medwin’s words becomes increasingly apparent.
Wash isn’t any sort of Everyman; on the contrary, he’s a singular hero blessed with natural genius and hard-won bravery, a soaring sense of ambition and the relentless determination to make his wildest hopes come true. Like any of us, though, he’s a patchwork of influences and inspirations — the histories that span centuries and continents, the communities defined by both their solidarity and their diversity, the ideals that clash or contradict or marry to form new ones. Like any of us, he contains entire lifetimes within his own.