(That this first Masterpiece series to prominently feature Black people is a slave narrative is unsurprising, and worthy of further examination in and of itself.)īorn into slavery on a sugarcane plantation, July gets taken from her mother as a child simply because the owner’s sister Caroline (Atwell) spots her out in the fields and thinks she’s cute. “The Long Song,” an adaptation of Andrea Levy’s 2010 novel, not only centers a very specific Black character and experience, but deliberately dares any skittish viewers expecting something quite different to look away. Outside of something like Andrew Davies’ 2019 “Sanditon” adaptation, which cast Crystal Clarke as a Jane Austen character born in the West Indies, there really haven’t been any PBS Masterpiece dramas that spotlight Black characters, let alone have them steer the entire series. That the tragic heroine of this story is Black slave July ( Tamara Lawrance) rather than her corseted white mistress - played by period drama veteran Hayley Atwell, no less - immediately marks “The Long Song” as a very different kind of Masterpiece series.
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