21 pop culture moments in 2017 that spoke to the zeitgeist

Underground

On paper, blending escapism and slavery sounds like a recipe for disaster — or at least a major social media firestorm. (Good riddance, Confederate.) So, it’s a small miracle that Underground, a show that could aptly, if crudely, be described as “12 Years a Slave meets Ocean’s Eleven” survived even as long as it did. No doubt, it helped that the show aired on WGN America instead of, say, HBO, where it might have garnered more notice but also more scrutiny. But it was also legitimately good.

To be fair, the enterprise didn’t go off without a hitch. Season 1 was a rocky affair, devoting too much attention to thinly drawn white characters and veering a tad too often into lurid melodrama, even as it supplied gritty thrills scored to the likes of Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead”. In season 2, though, showrunners Mischa Green and Joe Pokaski seemed to discover their true calling. The heist plot gave way to a medley of survival and resistance narratives grounded in the language of Westerns. Scenes of wrenching suffering and loss alternated with fist-pumping showdowns and fiery speeches. While it was always daring, Underground now felt outright subversive, co-opting a historically whitewashed genre to center and empower black people.

Its crowning achievement is “Minty”, an episode that brings Aisha Hinds’s Harriet Tubman into the spotlight for what’s essentially an hour-long monologue. Here, we see a much different version of Harriet from the swaggering gunslinger introduced in the season 1 finale. Speaking to a group of predominately white abolitionists, she expresses vulnerability, doubt, frustration, and, at last, defiance. Slavery, she argues, is an act of war, and in order to end it, you have to fight back:

"If you don’t have it in you to take up arms against the injustice, then you got to pray another prayer, and you got to walk in it with conviction. He will provide, but you got to do your part. You got to find what it means for you to be a soldier. Beat back those that are trying to kill everything good and right and call it “making it great again”. We can’t afford to just be citizens in a time of war. That would be surrender. That’d be giving up our future and our souls. Ain’t nobody get to sit this one out, you hear me?"

At this point, Harriet is speaking directly to the camera — to us. Her call to action isn’t startling just because of the reference (though it certainly makes you sit up), but also because of the way it momentarily collapses time, bridging past and present. It reminds us that our current struggles are nothing new, and we owe it to previous generations as well as future ones to make the world better.