Amazon has released another teaser trailer for it’s upcoming historical fiction miniseries, The Underground Railroad. The series comes from writer and director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk), and it’s inspired by the metaphorical Underground Railroad, which was a network of secret routes and safe houses used in the mid-19th century to help slaves escape out of slavery into the free states.
This new story imagines the Underground Railroad that we’re all familiar with as an actual railroad located beneath the southern soil, taking slaves on the first journey of their free life. This actually looks like a beautifully made series.
The show is based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, and the story follows Cora, “a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia who is an outcast even amongst her fellow Africans and is struggling coming into womanhood when she meets Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia who informs her of the Underground Railroad, inspiring them both to take the risk and escape to freedom.”
These events lead Cora on a journey “as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. After escaping her Georgia plantation for the rumored Underground Railroad, Cora discovers no mere metaphor, but an actual railroad full of engineers and conductors, and a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the southern soil.”
The series stars Thuso Mbedu, Chase W. Dillon, Aaron Pierre, Joel Edgerton, Damon Herriman, William Jackson Harper, Amber Gray, Jim Klock, Lily Rabe, Fred Hechinger, and Owen Harn.
The 11-episode limited series has been in development for a long time and it will debut on Amazon Prime on May 14th.