This show and first season were superbly written and well-acted! If you haven’t seen it, you are missing something spectacular!
In Wednesday’s season finale of WGN America’s Underground, escaped slave Noah (Aldis Hodge), gives a stirring speech about justice.
I want to be counted. It’s our hands that built this country.
It’s our blood that’s running through the heart of it.
We keep it beating!
Seem to me that make me more American than any of you.
It’s a powerful speech, and Mr. Hodge is typically magnetic. But just as striking is what he’s doing as he says it: brandishing a revolver in each hand, Tarantino-style, holding off a room full of white men as he raids a U.S. marshal’s lockup to free a group of fellow slaves. It’s a fiery political statement, in the middle of a hard-core action scene.
That’s Underground. The show, recently renewed for a second season, began with a challenge: making a serial drama about a historical atrocity that both does it justice and competes with escapist entertainment.