Enslaved

This is ok but not as good as you'd expect from its promotion and the involvement of Samuel L Jackson. Some of the cinematography is quite good and it tells some interesting stories. However it's quite dumbed down and feels like one of the American made 'documentaries' you see on the history channel ie light on academic detail/heavy on entertainment. For some reason most of the story is told by a group of divers and a journalist. Fair enough but none of them seem to have any academic or expert background at all. There are some experts but not many. Samuel L Jackson also has very limited involvement. He features quite a lot in the last episode but in the other episodes he's probably there for 5-10mins max, often not saying anything at all.

Overall I feel like in four hours I could have learnt a lot more of what is clearly a very important subject. I don't think this series did the subject justice at all.

This is such an important show to have right now! It really taught me a lot and is so interesting, as someone who doesn't watch many documentaries I really enjoyed this show. The dives were so exciting!

This is about a organisation Dwp diving with a purpose who have traced some shipwrecks that they believe may be connected to slave ships that sank, they found objects that say they were used in slavery, they then get upset about a spoon and ivory. They risk their lives diving for these objects but the laws prevent them from recovering bigger objects. The slave trade was brutal and story should be told, but the first and second program are slow and dragged out. The series does get better and the story does show that even black people were involved at point of sale, but as slavery was accepted at the time people who were slaves and educated Americans rose up and help free slaves before the civil war. If you stick with the program it does have some merit, but just not all about begin of slavery, but more about ships and how slaves were packed and died on shipwrecks. The stories in episode three of people escaping slavery and finding freedom was more interesting than story of a shipwrecks.

Enslaved is an uneven show partially because of the unrelenting sheen of US melodrama and partially because it's divided quite rigidly between the meandering explorations of marine conservation charity "Diving With a Purpose" and the international investigative probings of Afua Hirsch and producer/director Simcha Jacobovici - the latter occasionally with a charismatic and occasionally visibly bored Samuel L in tow. With this in mind I'll split the review into these separate partitions as well:

Diving With a Purpose's parts are, like most targeted archaeology investigations, a wild goose chase, visually tedious and often result in very little material wise. As such the deeply earnest diving squad have to do a lot of padding, sometimes inserting strangely forced "drama" and lot of standing around and praying. When they're with the more understated British crews it throws their melodrama into sharp relief and they end up looking rather foolish which is a shame as their unwavering dedication is quite endearing. The look of relentless concern on the face of diver Kramer Wimberley is the lone highlight of these segments.

If Enslaved were entirely the history segments alone I'd have a lot more love for it, the sequences are slickly shot (they trot the globe with a drone in tow and you get some amazing visuals out of it) and there are some interesting discussions and revelations but some excursions are less educational and more cringe worthy than others and the constant CONSTANT use of reconstructive flashbacks as if imagining someone drowning or people in the past standing around talking is too much of an ask. I understand it's for the US audience but it feels condescending and irritating.

All-in-all Enslaved is a worthy subject with patchy execution - the two separate halves of it never tie together and episodes often feel structureless and end abruptly. Its dense and serious investigations are undermined by its simplistic and melodramatic tone.

I was left wondering who this was aimed at? On one hand it seemed to gloss over the horrors of this vile occurrence but then seemed bent on entertainment. The episode on emancipation was the most interesting because it told an investigation story but then failed to even mention William Wilberforce ( and if you don't know who he was go look him up)