He’s been on a tear, freeing slaves and fighting their masters as the head of his ragtag little army.
Brown is raging through Kansas as payback for the sacking of the antislavery settlement of Lawrence by proslavery settlers. How Henry Shackleford and John Brown come together and form a fraught relationship is the subject of the opening episode titled “Meet the Lord,” directed by Albert Hughes of the Hughes brothers ( Menace II Society, Dead Presidents, From Hell, The Book of Eli). Yes to all? Well, then, this show is for you, too. But I’m not sure where that leaves the rest of you.Īre you obsessed with the Civil War? Do you love John Brown like family, and have you long been hoping that a movie or TV series would take on that looming, near-mythic figure and try to do him justice? Are you a huge fan of the American tall tale, made most famous by Mark Twain, and frequently drawn upon by the Coen brothers in films such as O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs? Do you know Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn almost too well? The series seems to have been designed for me personally, so of course I love it - from the spaghetti Western–style animated opening credit sequence to the gospel music-filled score to every last spittle fleck flying out of John Brown’s mouth as he calls upon the might of the Lord to help him smite the slavers. Through his skeptical, young eyes, we study the wild-haired radical abolitionist John Brown, played by an unexpectedly excellent Ethan Hawke in the role of a lifetime. The Good Lord Bird is a new seven-episode Showtime series set in the 1850s Border War of “Bleeding Kansas.” It’s about a teenage slave named Henry Shackleford (Joshua Caleb Johnson) caught in the pre–Civil War cross fire of both official military and renegade proslavery and antislavery forces.
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