Enslaved

Just watched ep. 1 and was moved by much of it and found the rest compelling.

If you haven't watched something and/or find the subject matter of no interest to you, why try and discourage others from actually experiencing it and forming their own opinion? Look at the rest of his reviews for context.

I was really looking forward to this documentary as the premise seemed really interesting.

The documentary feels disjointed. The historic factual information from the historians with Samuel L Jackson are great. There were things I think are probably widely known but there were lots of these parts that brought context to the scale of slavery. I found these parts engaging and interesting and more than once exclaimed aloud about them. Had the documentary been just these parts, this would be a very different review.

Then we come to the diving parts. These felt jarring. There's interesting, shocking sections with Samuel and Afra at the door of no return and the like. It then basically cuts to the diving team having a seemingly scripted discussion about the perils of diving in the English Channel followed by lots of faux perilous voice over about the technicalities while they bring up an item probably returned to the UK on a slave ship. It honestly felt like someone had changed the channel. This feeling continued through the whole series. The diving part felt unnecessarily technical and unnecessary in general. It didn't tell the stories in the way I had hoped and only really detracted from the non diving sections.

Do yourself a favour and look up documentaries by David Olusoga.

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.

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)

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.