Enslaved

After promising so much with an obviously large budget, great production and, of course SLJ, this show rapidly revealed itself as a 'product of 2020'. I'd suggest that most viewers were already aware of the horrors of the African slave trade and were expecting insight and historical fact. Instead, they were served up large portions of conjecture alongside some badly constructed narratives that seemed to have served only to justify the very expensive diving expeditions. Add in the bizarrely staged / dubbed conversations, and the end result is an unwatchable, virtue-signalling mess, devoid of historical accuracy and authenticity. What a shame and a complete missed opportunity.

Just watched ep. 1 and was moved by much of it and found the rest compelling.

If you haven't watched something and/or find the subject matter of no interest to you, why try and discourage others from actually experiencing it and forming their own opinion? Look at the rest of his reviews for context.

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.

I was really looking forward to this documentary as the premise seemed really interesting.

The documentary feels disjointed. The historic factual information from the historians with Samuel L Jackson are great. There were things I think are probably widely known but there were lots of these parts that brought context to the scale of slavery. I found these parts engaging and interesting and more than once exclaimed aloud about them. Had the documentary been just these parts, this would be a very different review.

Then we come to the diving parts. These felt jarring. There's interesting, shocking sections with Samuel and Afra at the door of no return and the like. It then basically cuts to the diving team having a seemingly scripted discussion about the perils of diving in the English Channel followed by lots of faux perilous voice over about the technicalities while they bring up an item probably returned to the UK on a slave ship. It honestly felt like someone had changed the channel. This feeling continued through the whole series. The diving part felt unnecessarily technical and unnecessary in general. It didn't tell the stories in the way I had hoped and only really detracted from the non diving sections.

Do yourself a favour and look up documentaries by David Olusoga.

If you are into diving and like long stretches of video depicting divers on the sea bottom looking for a piece of ivory then this is the show for you.