Enslaved

Enslaved is an uneven show partially because of the unrelenting sheen of US melodrama and partially because it's divided quite rigidly between the meandering explorations of marine conservation charity "Diving With a Purpose" and the international investigative probings of Afua Hirsch and producer/director Simcha Jacobovici - the latter occasionally with a charismatic and occasionally visibly bored Samuel L in tow. With this in mind I'll split the review into these separate partitions as well:

Diving With a Purpose's parts are, like most targeted archaeology investigations, a wild goose chase, visually tedious and often result in very little material wise. As such the deeply earnest diving squad have to do a lot of padding, sometimes inserting strangely forced "drama" and lot of standing around and praying. When they're with the more understated British crews it throws their melodrama into sharp relief and they end up looking rather foolish which is a shame as their unwavering dedication is quite endearing. The look of relentless concern on the face of diver Kramer Wimberley is the lone highlight of these segments.

If Enslaved were entirely the history segments alone I'd have a lot more love for it, the sequences are slickly shot (they trot the globe with a drone in tow and you get some amazing visuals out of it) and there are some interesting discussions and revelations but some excursions are less educational and more cringe worthy than others and the constant CONSTANT use of reconstructive flashbacks as if imagining someone drowning or people in the past standing around talking is too much of an ask. I understand it's for the US audience but it feels condescending and irritating.

All-in-all Enslaved is a worthy subject with patchy execution - the two separate halves of it never tie together and episodes often feel structureless and end abruptly. Its dense and serious investigations are undermined by its simplistic and melodramatic tone.

Overproduced and disjoint at the same time.The Americans can not make a documentary without hugely oversimplifying the story.The BBC should have done this anyone with some historical knowledge will find this to be very pathetically done.This is no better than the dumb history channel documentaries.

After promising so much with an obviously large budget, great production and, of course SLJ, this show rapidly revealed itself as a 'product of 2020'. I'd suggest that most viewers were already aware of the horrors of the African slave trade and were expecting insight and historical fact. Instead, they were served up large portions of conjecture alongside some badly constructed narratives that seemed to have served only to justify the very expensive diving expeditions. Add in the bizarrely staged / dubbed conversations, and the end result is an unwatchable, virtue-signalling mess, devoid of historical accuracy and authenticity. What a shame and a complete missed opportunity.

I was left wondering who this was aimed at? On one hand it seemed to gloss over the horrors of this vile occurrence but then seemed bent on entertainment. The episode on emancipation was the most interesting because it told an investigation story but then failed to even mention William Wilberforce ( and if you don't know who he was go look him up)

If you are into diving and like long stretches of video depicting divers on the sea bottom looking for a piece of ivory then this is the show for you.