SHOW OF THE WEEK: The Underground Railroad (May 14, Amazon)

Thuso Mbedu as Cora in “The Underground Railroad.” PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of Amazon

It feels strange to describe something that deals with the abomination of slavery as beautiful, but “The Underground Railroad” is a gorgeous piece of television, grandly cinematic, even when it’s laying bare ugliness.

That seems fitting given that it’s the debut TV project of Barry Jenkins, renowned as the director and co-writer of Oscar-winning films “Moonlight” and “If Beale Street Could Talk.”

He couldn’t have taken on a more ambitious task: a 10-episode adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Colson Whitehead.

Jenkins has created an epic that envelops you with its sights and sounds and feelings, with images that seep into your consciousness like fragments of vivid dreams.

He’s aided brilliantly by cinematographer James Laxton and composer Nicholas Britell, who also collaborated on his movies. Thanks to them, the look and sound of the series are truly striking. But none of that would matter if the performances didn’t live up to the esthetics.

Thuso Mbedu, a South African actor who’s unknown in North America — but presumably not for long — imbues Cora, the teenage slave whose journey we follow, with fierce intelligence and profound spirit. Cora navigates myriad emotions and states of being along with the many miles she travels and Mbedu dynamically conveys them all, often using just her face and her large, expressive eyes.

Praise is also due to Aaron Pierre as Cora’s fellow plantation slave Caesar; Sheila Atim as her mother, Mabel; William Jackson Harper as Royal, a free Black man who aids Cora; Joel Edgerton as slave catcher Ridgeway and, especially, Chase Dillon as Homer, the young Black boy who helps Ridgeway do his dirty work.

When we first meet Cora she’s picking cotton in Georgia, marked by the abandonment of her mother, who left the plantation years before.

Cora flees on the Underground Railroad, which, in the show as in the book, is an actual subterranean train system. (Some of the most haunting parts of the soundscape are heard waiting for trains underground; the Earth itself seems to be moaning.) From there we follow Cora from state to state and from one type of white treachery to another.

The series deals more in the psychic wounds of slavery than the physical ones, although the first episode features graphic violence that put me in mind of “12 Years a Slave.” It’s clear that even for the Black men and women we meet who aren’t enslaved, freedom is fragile and requires constant vigilance.

Ridgeway, who’s the most fully formed character besides Cora, chases her relentlessly, obsessed with the daughter since the mother was the only slave he couldn’t catch.

Cora must elude not only Ridgeway, but her own image of herself as someone so unworthy of love that her own mother abandoned her. When she finally breaks through the anger, her joy is short-lived, quashed by a brutal betrayal that is both shocking and predictable.

But Cora is a survivor, even when she doesn’t want to be. As she makes yet another escape, it’s not clear where she’ll end up and whether she’ll be safe there; we can only hope she’ll find true freedom, in both mind and spirit, a hope that extends to her descendants and the descendants of all those enslaved.

The Crime of the Century (May 10 and 11, 9 p.m., HBO/Crave)

A graveyard scene underscores the cost of the opioid crisis in “The Crime of the Century.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of HBO

Infuriating and depressing: that’s how I would describe this two-part documentary by Alex Gibney, the Oscar- and Emmy-winning filmmaker behind docs like “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief.”

But it’s also worth watching for a lucid and detailed explanation of the American opioid crisis.

There are villains galore here, everyone from profit-obsessed drug company executives and sales reps, to doctors and pharmacists who take bribes to dispense ridiculously powerful pills to patients, to the corrupt Federal Drug Administration officer who allowed oxycontin to be declared safe for chronic pain relief, to the politicians who push big pharma interests in exchange for campaign contributions, to the justice department officials who buried evidence of drug company wrongdoing in exchange for guilty pleas and slap-on-the-wrist fines.

What is abundantly clear is that the opioid epidemic, which has killed some 500,000 Americans in the last 20 years, is also an epidemic of greed.

Opium — from which drugs like morphine, heroin and oxycodone are derived — has been cultivated since the reign of King Tut and has fuelled western profit and addiction for at least a couple of centuries, but Gibney pins the origins of the current epidemic on three brothers from Brooklyn and their pharmaceutical company.

It was the Sackler brothers, whom Gibney describes as “some of the world’s most successful drug pushers,” and Purdue Pharma who came up with OxyContin, a continuous-release form of Oxycodone.

But the drug’s original use, end-of-life cancer pain, wasn’t lucrative enough so the FDA was convinced to allow a claim that the drug’s delayed absorption mechanism reduced the likelihood of addiction — and Purdue and other drug-makers that followed its lead were off to the races.

Evidence began to mount not long after that Oxy was being used as a street drug, crushed and snorted, or dissolved and injected, but Purdue’s line was that the addicts were at fault, not the pills.

And then there’s fentanyl, another powerful drug initially meant for cancer patients, which is the subject of much of the second episode of the doc.

The resulting carnage is assessed by journalists (the Washington Post is a partner in the series), concerned doctors, drug company whistleblowers, people who’ve seen the deaths firsthand and crusaders like Joe Rannazzisi, who lost his Drug Enforcement Administration job for speaking out against a U.S. law that makes it harder to crack down on drug distributors who supply the so-called “pill mills” that flourish in Florida and elsewhere.

Gibney piles outrage upon outrage, more than I can do justice to here. Your best bet is to watch for yourself.

Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer (May 11, 8 p.m., PBS)

Author Steven Johnson and broadcaster David Olusoga guide viewers through “Extra Life.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of Nutopia

What could be more timely than a history of vaccination as we line up for our COVID-19 shots? Personally, I had no idea that the forerunner of today’s inoculations was a practice known as variolation — making a small incision in the arm and smearing it with smallpox fluid— that was imported to the United States in the 1700s via an African slave named Onesimus.

Engaging hosts Steven Johnson and David Olusoga take us through that history, including the development of the world’s first vaccine by British doctor Edward Jenner in the late 1700s, to the eventual eradication of smallpox, a disease that killed many millions of people going back centuries. It was vanquished by 73 countries working together in the 1960s and ’70s to vaccinate everyone on the planet, an achievement that holds a measure of hope for today’s pandemic battle.

As epidemiologist Larry Brilliant says, “People forget what human beings can do when we’re unencumbered by divisiveness and hate, and that we stand up to the moment in time.”

Obviously, the current vaccination push against COVID is part of the discussion, with nods to vaccine hesitancy and the need to vaccinate in every country in the world, especially the poorest ones, to avoid prolonging the pandemic.

All this is part of a look at how science and medical innovations have lengthened life expectancy. It’s shocking to think that a person born in 1900 could expect to live an average of just 32 years whereas, today, the average Canadian can expect to live to at least 80.

The series, presented by TV production company Nutopia, also includes episodes about the use of data, medical inventions and public behaviour. If that sounds dry, I expect them to be highly watchable if they’re anything like the first.

For a look at the very start of the human life span, PBS also has “Fighting for Fertility” (“Nova,” May 12, 9 p.m.), about how science and technology are helping people who are struggling to have children.

Short Takes

From left, Kim Fields, Mike Epps and Gabrielle Dennis in “The Upshaws.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Lara Solanki/Netflix

The Upshaws (May 12, Netflix)

This sitcom, co-created by Regina Y. Hicks (“Insecure”) and comedian Wanda Sykes, is about a Black working class family in Indiana. The family dynamics are complex: Bennie (Mike Epp, “Uncle Buck”) has four kids, three with his wife and former high school sweetheart, Regina (Kim Fields, a.k.a. Tootie from “The Facts of Life”), one with his high school “baby mama” Tasha (Gabrielle Dennis, “Rosewood”). From what I can tell from the episode I watched it’s got the pacing and the non-stop punchlines of your standard sitcom. The best lines come from the animosity between Bennie and his sister-in-law Lucretia, played by Sykes.

Netflix also has the movie “The Woman in the Window,” about an agoraphobic in New York City who may or may not have witnessed a crime. It’s from director Joe Wright (“Darkest Hour”) and has a crazy stacked cast, led by Amy Adams alongside Julianne Moore, Gary Oldman, Anthony Mackie and Wyatt Russell. Also debuting on May 14 are “Halston,” the latest from Ryan Murphy, with Ewan McGregor starring as the famous fashion designer, and Season 2 of animated series “Love, Death & Robots.”

Odds and Ends

I didn’t get a chance to check out “Blinded — Those Who Kill” on Acorn (May 10), but it’s headlined by Natalie Madueno as criminal profiler Louise Bergstein, who also starred in the absorbing Danish crime drama “Darkness — Those Who Kill.” Acorn also has “Amber” (May 10), a Dublin-set drama about a teenage girl who goes missing.

If you haven’t had enough of Britney Spears docs yet, BBC Select has “The Battle for Britney: Fans, Cash and a Conservatorship” (May 11), in which journalist Mobeen Azhar looks into the pop star’s legal issues by talking to everyone but Britney. I understand Britney herself is not a fan of the show.

NOTE: The dates and times listed here reflect information provided to me and cross-checked where possible against broadcast and streaming schedules, but it’s always best to check listings for your own area. The selection of series reviewed reflects what I’m given access to by networks and streamers, whether reviews are embargoed, how many shows I have time to watch and my own personal taste.