The Good Lord Bird

Ethan Hawke plays Captain John Brown an abolitionist of slavery prior to the civil war and sometimes he can be a hit or miss with his performances, however this is definitely a hit in this beautiful blended story of truth and black comedy. Most of us only have the benefit of hindsight, but every now and again one of us has the foresight or maybe its just the courage and conviction to fight for what's righteous. The cast is superb, with great direction and cinematography. The script is witty and powerful and the story is... as they say history

Was expecting a lot of woke and no substance, but this surprised me. Life can be funnier than any piece of fiction. It's a dark comedy. Ethan Hawke is amazing. Gets better with each episode.

The Good Lord Bird was every bit as good the reviews said it would be. It is such a powerful story about a newly freed teenager who joins abolitionist John Brown (Ethan Hawke) on a holy crusade to end slavery. They encounter great historical figures like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Truman along the way. It's a story that everyone should know. It shines a spotlight on racial, religious and gender roles that have made up America. The one thing I wasn't expecting from this was the humor throughout the series, it just makes the show that much better. Ethan Hawke is amazing here as always and was nominated for an Emmy and Golden Globe for his performance!

To Frederick Douglass, he said "Howdy Fred". That was so darn funny I'm laughing a long time afterwards. The writer punctured a full balloon with those two words. Show just keeps getting better with each episode.

Ethan Hawke & Mark Richard's adaptation of James McBride's semi-historical novel is a fascinating and morally complex endeavour. We follow the story of John Brown through the eyes of the fictional Little Onion - a teenager emancipated through violence and trying for the most part to simply survive this turbulent era in American history. It's a slightly irreverent version of real events, with Brown's formidable wife sadly excised but its fanciful twirls are neatly balanced against the brutality and come across as keen wit rather than clumsy revisionism. The real lynchpin of the whole endeavour is Ethan Hawke's battered Brown who oscillates wildly between devout believer and violent zealot never quite settling into anything categorizable but is a bewitching screen presence (despite portraits of Brown clearly pointing at Willem Defoe as the obvious choice - a casting bugbear that may bother me forever).

The cast are uniformly impressive, from personal favourites like Beau Knapp, Wyatt Russell and Steve Zahn to revelatory turns by a rather pompous Daveed Diggs and the arrestingly bemused Joshua Caleb Johnson who shines throughout. Also KILLER MIKE IS IN IT. GUYS, KILLER MIKE. GUYS. SERIOUSLY. What's more it feels a timely story - John Brown is the first American tried for treason and through him is the existential prism of what America was and is. A wrestle of our times, of all times, is it THE grand experiment of self-identification, freedom and democracy or the turbulent land of overt evangelism and violent segregation? Either way or neither way the US is inarguably at the pinnacle of televisual storytelling and the Good Lord Bird is a fantastic addition to that weighty canon of great American TV stories and a nice atmospheric taster for the complex and bloody historical legacy of abolitionism.