The Epic Journey to ‘The Underground Railroad’

How Barry Jenkins and his band of indie filmmakers made television’s most ambitious take on American slavery since “Roots.”

ATLANTA — There was only one time when he seriously thought about quitting. The project, a 10-episode series for Amazon, had just been announced, in the fall of 2016. Within hours of the news — BARRY JENKINS TO ADAPT HOT NOVEL ‘UNDERGROUND RAILROAD’ — the tweets had arrived. THIS is what he’s doing after “Moonlight”? I HATE slave movies. Do we really need more images of Black people getting brutalized? Jenkins almost pulled the plug right then. He could have moved onto something else — a rom-com, maybe, or a beloved Disney cartoon — but that didn’t feel right. There was a story he needed to tell. Not about the physical violence of slavery, but something subtler, about the psychic and emotional scourge, and the unfathomable spiritual strength required for any individual — let alone an entire people — to have come out alive.