At first blush, there's little in Underground that's new. If you've seen Roots or 12 Years a Slave, you've seen its brutal depiction of the slave-era south. And if you've seen Freedom, the 2014 feature film directed by Australian Peter Cousens, you'll be acquainted with the Underground Railroad, the network of people and secret routes that ferried slaves from the south to freedom in the north in the 1840s and '50s.
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But give it time and the true virtues of Underground (now streaming on Stan) rise to the surface.
For a start, there's the invigorating use of music – mostly contemporary, often drawing a subtle link from field music to hip-hop, from gospel to R&B – under the guiding hand of John Legend, one of the show's executive producers. This certainly isn't music as wallpaper, merely to provide background decoration; it's a central part of the storytelling. It may not always work, but the choices are never less than thought-provoking.
It is also made more like an action thriller than historical drama. At its heart is the escape of seven slaves following a mythical route they have only heard of until Noah (Aldis Hodge) finds directions carved into the wall of a timber hut. He can't read them, of course, but he knows enough to take an impression of them until he can find someone who can.
Best of all, Underground plays with the contrast between black and white, and not just the simple dichotomy of slave and master.
There are glimmers of decency even in the vilest of characters, hints of darkness within the most heroic. In lawyer John Hawkes (Marc Blucas) and his beautiful wife Elizabeth (Australian actor Jessica De Gouw, who is terrific), for instance, we have a pair of liberals drawn to join the underground but afraid of what it might mean for their own cushy lives.
The contrasts play like duelling banjos throughout, but reach a crescendo in the third episode, which opens with two religious services – one black, in the open field, the other white, in a church – using the same text but with vastly different meanings: one justifies apartheid, the other seeks hope and consolation in the word of God.
Rather to her own surprise, Elizabeth Hawkes (Australia's Jessica De Gouw) becomes a people smuggler. Photo: Skip Bolen
The slaves live on the plantation owned by Tom Macon (Reed Diamond), a blow-in from the north who has taken to southern ways like a duck to water. Touring his property with a bunch of grandees whose support he wants in his bid to become a senator, he says that after he arrived, "I learned what I could about three things: Growing cotton, managing slaves, and how to be an honourable man of the south."
That last apparently includes doling out 50 lashes to his entire slave workforce when he suspects one of them of a transgression. It includes taking the slave who runs his household, Ernestine (Amirah Vann), as his sexual plaything. It includes selling off a bereaved mother when she threatens to become an unsettling influence on the other slaves.
Plantation owner Tom Macon (Reed Diamond).
Ernestine's daughter Rosalee (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) is tempted to join the runaways, if only because she has fallen for Noah. She's not sure she has what it takes to make a run, but as a beautiful young black woman born into and destined to die in slavery, she doesn't really have any better offers.
"It's suffocating being in the master's house," she tells her brother, a carpenter who lives in the slave quarters. "Out here, no matter how small, at least you've got something of your own. Me and momma are just shadows in somebody else's world."
Oddly, Underground reminds me of shows like Prison Break, Homeland and 24 – high-octane adventures with characters facing insurmountable odds, driven by a sense of utmost urgency. The fact it is rooted in grim reality makes it that much more powerful.
Karl Quinn is on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin