I’m a big fan of “The Porter,” the juicy, compelling series set in 1920s Montreal and Chicago, now streaming on BET+ and other platforms.
Premiering earlier this year north of the U.S./Canadian border, this co-production of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and BET blends undersung Black history, gangster melodrama, nightclub sequences and a rich array of Black working-class lives, all against the backdrop of the historic formation of a North American railway workers union. At the time, white workers typically were paid three times more than Black employees. Out of such inequity, movements are made, though 30 minutes into the first of its eight artfully sustained episodes, it’s clear “The Porter” has a lot going on besides clandestine labor meetings.
The series hit big enough in Canada to make a second season extraordinarily likely. No hard-nosed docudrama, this is instead a freewheeling ‘20s fantasia, a decade in the making. (Marsha Greene, Annmarie Morais, Charles Officer and R.T. Thorne took the reins as series creators, following a narrative template set out by Arnold Pinnock and Bruce Ramsay.) The trains in “The Porter” run primarily from Montreal to Chicago; the storylines crisscross, easily and imaginatively.
