More frequently, though, each episode feels like the summarizing of an essay, most from the original 1619 collection, which means that a subject worthy of two hours or 10 hours might be rushed through in 55 minutes, with little autobiographical notes scattered in. When she’s using the loss of her grandmother’s hard-earned house to illustrate the struggle to establish generational wealth within the Black community or making her first pilgrimage to the ancestral land in Greenwood, Mississippi, there’s a compelling specificity to the series, one that puts its curator’s imprint on the broader journalistic thesis. Hulu’s 1619 Project takes Hannah-Jones’ own background - she grew up in Iowa with a Black father and white mother, while her roots go back to the racist heart of Mississippi - as its spine and is most effective when it feels most personal. The point is that slavery, in addition to being our American original sin, was so potent that its tendrils impacted and infected every single aspect of our national life, from policing and the justice system to our particularly brutal version of capitalism - and that failure to understand that leaves us unable to move forward except in willful ignorance. Contrary to claims from the political right, the purpose of the series was never to literally demand that “1776” be erased as a landmark, nor to make every white person feel like the villain in our collective narrative. In this medium, the game was already changed - showrunner Shoshana Guy worked on Netflix’s High on the Hog, another probably superior predecessor - and The 1619 Project is just a participant.įor those who missed out, the premise of the series is that the arrival of the first slave ship in the colonies is a national origin story of sorts.

On the page, The 1619 Project cast a long intellectual shadow, but on TV it’s in the shadow cast by Raoul Peck’s pugnacious Exterminate All the Brutes, by Sophia Nahli Allison’s lyrical E yes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground, by several shows from print transplant Sacha Jenkins ( Everything’s Gonna Be All White) and by more PBS documentaries than I care to count. 'The Bear' Season 2 Trailer: New Menu, Same Intensity

The 1619 project series