Disney's new drama brushes aside the evils of slavery for a tale of derring-do

Telegraph

23-07-2025

Of the many epic adventures that have appeared on television in the last five or so years, few have been as gripping as the streamers' attempts to conquer family viewing. Washington Black (Disney+), a sprawling picaresque that follows a young, brilliant, plantation slave called George 'Wash' Black (played by Eddie Karanja as a child and Ernest Kingsley Junior as an adult) is the latest attempt.
Beginning on Barbados in 1837, Wash's potential is spotted immediately by a British abolitionist and amateur scientist called Titch (Tom Ellis), and together they work to build a Heath-Robinson flying machine. When Wash is involved in the killing of a white man – maybe he did it, maybe he didn't – who is the evil plantation owner's brother no less, he hitches up with Titch, fires up the airship and makes his escape.
There follows many an episode of derring-do as they make their way north, first to Virginia, then up through Nova Scotia, on round the Arctic and finally down into Europe and eventually North Africa. All the while a scowling bounty hunter is on Wash's tail, for jeopardy and plot propulsion.
Modern television abhors a linear narrative, and so this big-budget, period globe-trotting is intercut with two other stories. In the early episodes we flash-forward to Wash eight years later, hiding out in Halifax, Nova Scotia as a grown man. He has maintained and cultivated his interest in science to the best that a former slave in hiding possibly can, so when a renowned British botanist called Goff (Rupert Graves, good as ever) gets off the boat, there's finally a chance for Wash to fulfil his ambitions.
Unfortunately, but also fortunately for Wash, Goff arrives with his daughter Tanna (Iola Evans). Unbeknownst to her, she has been lined up by her father for an arranged marriage and so when she inevitably falls for Wash, she, he and her dad all find themselves in a right inter-generational pickle.
Washington Black is therefore attempting to do a lot of things at once. It is a bowdlerised Underground Railroad that is nonetheless a salutary reminder to younger viewers of the wickedness of slavery. It is also a rousing, Around the World in 80 Days-style hop-and-stop that doesn't want you to think too hard about the wickedness of slavery because this is supposed to be fun. And there is Romeo and Juliet in there too, a tale of forbidden love and tragic romance that, by having Tanna as a black woman passing as white, has things to say about social discrimination and prejudice.
The show certainly makes a better fist of this kind of four-quadrant viewing than, say, Amazon's recent Nautilus. That was a similarly grand confection about Captain Nemo and his submarine that foundered on a duff script. (Interestingly, it was originally a Disney production and you wonder if they ditched it because a better version of the same thing – this – came along.)
Still, however, Washington Black underestimates younger viewers. Its hero is too heroic when the story demands it (he is stoical, a genius and even a dab hand with watercolours) and then suddenly too fallible when it doesn't (he goes sub aqua in a copper bell helmet, is told specifically that there's a valve for the oxygen, but then Dr Science somehow nearly suffocates). The characters all speak in cue-card aphorisms of the sort that primary school teachers pin to the walls. Even the doomed love story is too predictably doomed.
My suspicion – and it is only a suspicion, bearing in mind that I sit squarely in the dull and crusty demographic – is that trying to please a young audience by sanitising a slave narrative won't work. Challenging your viewers has got to be better than patronising them. Washington Black looks at those moral grey areas but chooses to present the world in black and white.