As with Jenkins’s films, the TV version of “The Underground Railroad” is impressionistic, using immersive sound design and subtle lighting to plunge viewers into the sometimes punishing emotions of each moment.īased on Lauren Oliver’s 2014 novel, the action-suspense series “Panic” is set in a depressed blue-collar town where the graduating high school seniors compete in an unofficial, highly illegal annual competition, completing life-threatening dares for the chance to win enough money to move away. The director Barry Jenkins - best-known for the Oscar-winning movie “Moonlight” - has adapted the book into a ten-part series, starring Thuso Mbedu as Cora, who flees her captors in Georgia and embarks on a winding journey through multiple states, encountering different cultures that are each oppressive in their own way. At once historical and fantastical, Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer- and National Book Award-winning novel “The Underground Railroad” depicts an alternate version of the 19th-century American South in which a literal subterranean railway helps ex-slaves escape from plantations, carrying them to freedom through a succession of strange and inhospitable lands.