The Good Lord Bird," the new Showtime miniseries starring Ethan Hawke and based on the National Book Award-winning bestseller by James McBride, is a great American epic starring Hawke as storied abolitionist John Brown.
The series (Sundays, 9 EDT/PDT) is not a history lesson, nor is it a political treatise. By design, and true to McBride's written word, it is a deeply human look at Brown, the man enshrined in "The Battle Hymn of The Republic" and in textbooks for his 1859 raid on the U.S. Armory at Harper's Ferry — an attempt to spark a slave revolt two years before the start of the Civil War.
“People don’t want to look at politics — politics suck," says Hawke. "But if you care about the people then you see how politics is ruining their lives, then you get politicized and that’s the accomplishment of ‘The Good Lord Bird.’ That book is impossible to put down. It’s as funny and wild as ‘Huck Finn,’ and it’s charged with a political landscape that ‘Huck Finn’ only hinted at.”
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