After Moonlight took the Oscars’ top prize, director Barry Jenkins jumps to the Amazon series The Underground Railroad.
After Moonlight surprised Oscar audiences (in more ways than one,) by nabbing the Best Motion Picture of the Year prize, the entertainment industry became the proverbial oyster of its director Barry Jenkins. However, Jenkins will first parlay his Moonlight momentum into the small screen medium, adapting an acclaimed alternate-history novel depicting the escape journey of two slaves from an antebellum U.S. South.
Jenkins will write and direct a limited series for Amazon called The Underground Railroad, adapting the 2016 novel of the same name by Colson Whitehead into hour-long episodes. The 19th-century story depicts Cora, a slave in a Georgia plantation – an outcast even amongst her peers – joining new male arrival Caesar on a harrowing and arduous escape Northward. With The Underground Railroad, Whitehead, who wrote novels like the 1999 inventive elevator drama The Intuitionist and 2011 zombie apocalypse epic Zone One, put a surreal, Homeric spin on the historical metaphorical concept of the Underground Railroad, also depicting it literally as a secret network of tunnels and tracks; something that should differentiate it in tone from WGN’s currently running television topical cousin Underground. The novel is a New York Times #1 bestseller, National Book Award Winner and a part of Oprah’s Book Club.
As Jenkins comments of the author in a statement:
“Going back to The Intuitionist, Colson’s writing has always defied convention, and The Underground Railroad is no different. It’s a groundbreaking work that pays respect to our nation’s history while using the form to explore it in a thoughtful and original way. Preserving the sweep and grandeur of a story like this requires bold, innovative thinking and in Amazon we’ve found a partner whose reverence for storytelling and freeness of form is wholly in line with our vision.”
The Underground Railroad will be an exciting passion project for Jenkins, set for a platform yielding creative leeway. After helming an array of short films, Jenkins made his feature debut with the 2008 romantic drama Medicine for Melancholy. He recently got his first taste of streaming television, having directed an episode of Netflix’s Dear White People.However, his long-awaited sophomore feature in 2016’s Moonlight reaped immense Awards Season accolades, notably at the Oscars with the Best Picture win, Best Actor win for Mahershala Ali and Best Adapted Screenplay win. Jenkins himself was nominated for Best Director.
The Underground Railroad will also see director Jenkins as an executive producer along with Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment.