For me, UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (2021, streaming on Amazon Prime) is nothing short of a monumental achievement.

Based on the excellent novel by Colson Whitehead, RAILROAD chronicles the travels of Cora, a field slave on an antebellum Georgia plantation, as she escapes and tries to find a place where she can finally be safe. Her means of escape is the Underground Railroad, though this is where the story very quickly diverges from reality into magical realism. While the real Underground Railroad was a network of people who helped slaves escape to the North, in this story, it is an actual physical railroad, seemingly created by a people’s hopes and aspirations.

Cora’s adventures take her through the South to the North, with each state similarly diverging from history to take a different approach to race relations. One state crushes Africans in brutal slavery, another enacts a seemingly beneficial but patronizing type of control, and so on. Along the way, Whitehead examines the impact of slavery on a nation, how it leaves scars that last long after the lash stops, and how it also twists and scars people and a nation that do the enslaving.

In short, it’s a great story, powerful but without seeming to lecture or scold, leaving us to think and feel for ourselves as viewers. And what a loving, artistic, and powerful adaptation Barry Jenkins pulls from it. From the cinematography to the sound design, everything about the show sings with craftsmanship. The acting is terrific across the board. The portrayal of the slave catcher Ridgeway gives us one of the best villains I’ve ever seen on television, a man tormented and twisted by his spiritual conscience but given to dark impulses and believing in a natural order in which his race is on top and therefore can do what it wants. The camera takes its time and lingers on faces to bring the interior landscape of the characters quietly but richly into view. Jenkins had a free hand with this creation, resulting in episodes ranging from around 20 minutes up to 77 minutes, whatever the “chapter” needed.

So yeah, I loved UNDERGROUND RAILROAD and highly recommend it as a truly loving, powerful piece of art.

Based on the Image comic series by Mark Millar, JUPITER’S LEGACY (2021, Netflix) suffers from a few overwrought character tropes and comes to a sudden stop rather than a real story end, but overall it delivers one hell of a great superhero story, something that is deeply familiar yet new enough to create a bold result.

In the near future, the world looks a lot like ours, basically going to hell in a hand basket, but with one big difference: In the 1930s, a group of Americans with superhuman powers emerged to set an example of morality while dedicating themselves to fighting evil, notably criminals. Now they’re old, though still formidable, and raising the next generation of superheroes to take their place. This produces huge conflicts, mostly involved with parents who were always off fighting evil and were never there, the pressure of being raised to become the next superheroes, the difficulties in keeping to a code not to kill when the bad guys are willing to do it, the difficulties in resisting the urge to take over and govern to save humanity from itself, the challenge of being a superhero at all in an increasingly gray and confusing world.

It’s all very fertile ground for the great types of philosophical questions the existence of superheroes raise, and JUPITER’S LEGACY handles them well. The story digs handfuls of traditional tropes and drops them into modern reality the way THE BOYS does, but while THE BOYS is entirely cynical (and probably more realistic), JUPITER’S LEGACY takes the traditional tropes seriously, gives them incredible power, and then challenges them, which again results in something known but also bold. But it’s not all angst and drama. There’s quite a bit of superhero action, and I enjoyed seeing them express their different types of powers.

While all this is happening, an alternate timeline is explored where we see how the superheroes got their powers, which I found equally compelling.

For some reason, critics didn’t like it. I can say not everything hit the mark for me. I had a few issues with the casting and a few minor quibbles with a few character tropes that felt over worn. But overall, it’s a pretty fresh, engaging take on the superhero myth, not as fun as Marvel and not as dark as DC, but somewhere comfortably in the middle with its own identity. My only real complaint was the ending. It ends with a big reveal but also some major cliffhangers, likely following the comics, which I think is risky for a show that doesn’t arrive with a second season already signed. But again, getting there was a ton of fun, and I’d recommend this one for people looking for something fresh with the superhero myth.