The Underground Railroad · Season 1 · Prime Video
The Underground Railroad Season 1
The Underground Railroad Season 1 is a MUST-WATCH, BollyMeter 9.0/10. 10 episodes on Prime Video from 14 May 2021.
Updated
What BollyAI Thinks
Barry Jenkins adapts Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer-winning novel with a visual language more indebted to Malick than prestige TV convention. The 95% Rotten Tomatoes score from 111 critics and a 92 Metascore place it among the most acclaimed American limited series of the decade. Critics clustered on three elements: the staggering scope of Jenkins's direction - each episode a self-contained mood piece with its own tonal register - Thuso Mbedu's performance as Cora, which carries genuine psychological weight across ten hours, and the show's moral seriousness about the specifics of American chattel slavery. The literal underground railroad - trains, tunnels, conductors - functions as both fairy-tale logic and a devastating commentary on the gap between the mythology of Black freedom and its reality. Joel Edgerton's slave catcher Ridgeway is the show's most unsettling creation: a man who believes in the righteousness of his pursuit.
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The Room
“Momentous, rhapsodic film-making that pushes television to places it has never been.”
Daily Telegraph“Its emotional highs and lows are stronger than anything you are likely to find on TV this year.”
Rolling Stone“Profoundly expansive and exploratory.”
Chicago Tribune
Standout Episodes
The hours worth arguing about - premieres, finales, and the turning points. BollyAI reads the room episode by episode.
- E1Georgia9.2
The opener establishes the Randall plantation's quotidian brutality with documentary precision before Cora's escape transforms the episode into something visionary. Jenkins's camera holds on faces and spaces longer than comfort allows. The final thirty minutes introduce the railroad's fantastical conceit with no apology.
The moment: The underground station emerges from earth as a real, functioning piece of infrastructure - Jenkins commits fully to the book's central metaphor and the image lands with extraordinary force.
“Momentous, rhapsodic film-making that pushes television to places it has never been.” - Daily Telegraph
- E5Tennessee - Exodus9.0
The most formally adventurous episode of the series - Ridgeway and Homer's perspective episode that forces the viewer to inhabit the slave catcher's moral framework. Edgerton and Chase W. Dillon are extraordinary together; the episode's final beat is the series at its most ethically demanding.
The moment: Homer's voluntary return to Ridgeway's service, framed without commentary - the show refuses to make the obvious explanatory gesture and trusts the image to do the work.
- E10Mabel9.1
The finale shifts to Cora's mother Mabel - the woman whose shadow has fallen across every episode. Sheila Atim's performance recontextualises the entire series; the structural decision to save this story for last is the show's most daring editorial choice.
The moment: The episode's concluding image transforms the series finale into something that feels closer to a requiem than a resolution - an extraordinary closing gesture.
“Its emotional highs and lows are stronger than anything you are likely to find on TV this year.” - Rolling Stone