This story contains extensive spoilers for Washington Black. If you go into Washington Black completely blind, you’d expect the Hulu new miniseries to be a promising period drama filled with adventure and romance. In the first few minutes, viewers follow the titular hero through an ordinary day: experimenting with his flying machine and going to work at the Halifax docks, until his life changes forever when he meets an alluring woman named Tanna Goffe (Iola Evans). It takes 13 minutes for the series to reveal the dark history that he cannot escape: George Washington Black ran away from a Barbados slave plantation as a child, with a bounty hunter on his tail.
The eight-episode series, adapted from Esi Edugyan’s acclaimed 2018 novel of the same name, concurrently follows Wash’s life as an adult and the start of his journey, when the then-11-year-old (played by Eddie Karanja) was taken under the wing of wealthy abolitionist inventor Christopher “Titch” Wilde (Tom Ellis). If the book-to-screen adaptation followed the same linear timeline as the novel, a majority of Wash’s story would be spent on his relationship with Titch, and the series would primarily be a subversive examination of the "white savior” trope. That would be a fine show, but I would've been left frustrated. Instead, Washington Black makes several elevated changes to establish Wash as the active protagonist of his own story, rather than a man who is reactive to his place in a society built by white men.
