The Underground Railroad: where to start reading
Adapts The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Say how far you watched, and pick the book up exactly there.
at The Underground Railroad.
The ten-episode limited series adapts Colson Whitehead's entire novel across one season, directed in full by Barry Jenkins. It follows the same characters and journey but invents scenes, adds a romance, and reworks parts of the ending, so the novel still holds surprises even after the show.
Limited Series draws on this book. Read the full story:
The Underground Railroad
What the show changed here
- InventedGrace, a girl Cora meets while in hiding, is a new addition given her own dedicated episode; she does not appear in the novel.
- InventedThe show gives Cora and Caesar a romantic relationship across the season; in the novel the two never become a couple.
- ChangedRidgeway's backstory is reworked: the show's father figure is sympathetic to enslaved people, a milder disagreement in the book.
- ChangedCora's mother Mabel and her friend Polly get an expanded flashback backstory arc in the finale that isn't in the novel.
- ChangedThe season's climactic confrontation between Cora and Ridgeway resolves differently on screen than in the novel's ending.
Barry Jenkins directed and executive produced all ten episodes of this 2021 Amazon Prime Video limited series himself (writing was shared among several writers, including Jenkins on four of the ten), adapting the entirety of Colson Whitehead's 2016 Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning novel in a single season with no season 2 planned. It keeps the same characters, states, and overall journey, but invents a major supporting character with her own dedicated episode, adds a romance the novel doesn't have, and changes how the climactic confrontation plays out. The novel is a standalone with no sequel, so there is nothing further to read beyond it.
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