'The Long Song' Episode 1 Recap

It’s taken just over two years for The Long Song, originally broadcast as a BBC One Christmas season mini-series in the U.K., to make it to our shores. But this small-screen adaptation of Andrea Levy’s Man Booker Prize-nominated novel’s message remains as relevant as ever. Because in this story about the challenges, trauma, and hard-won survival of a former plantation slave during the final days of slavery in 19th century Jamaica, the most significant aspect is the character who has control of the narrative.  In The Long Song, the audience experiences this tale as told from the POV of someone born into a barbaric system and forced to navigate the racism and oppression that propelled the British Empire.

In fact, we know this from the start when our elderly narrator tells us that this isn’t a story about a lonely white woman’s struggles to access luxuries like beef and fashionable accessories on a sugar plantation. Instead, Caroline Mortimer (Hayley Atwell) will obviously be the antagonist and a frivolous one at that. The true heroine of our story is July (played artfully by Tamara Lawrance). Her mischievous looks to the camera frequently break the fourth wall, inviting us to help keep her frock sabotage and delay tactics from her mistress.

But as old July suggests let’s start at The Beginning.