Don’t Sleep on Showtime’s ‘The Good Lord Bird’

The Good Lord Bird is not the show you think it is. A prestige cable drama about the days leading up to abolitionist John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry sounds like the kind of lecturing show we’ve yawned through before. But The Good Lord Bird is no such thing. Bloody, bawdy, and unflinching in its complex view of history, it’s the rare show that not only treats historic figures as both fallible human beings and larger-than-life characters. More than anything else, though, The Good Lord Bird is fun.

Based on the novel by James McBride, Showtime’s The Good Lord Bird tells the story of the events leading up to John Brown’s execution in 1859. (The title comes from a nickname Brown and his sons give a specially-plumed bird they call a “good lord bird.”) However our narrator isn’t a historian, but a young slave boy named Henry Shackleford (Joshua Caleb Johnson). John Brown (Ethan Hawke) precipitates a violent standoff in Henry’s native Kansas which results in Henry’s father’s murder. Believing he is saving Henry from slavery — and unwittingly believing him to be girl, whom he renames “Onion” — Brown actually kidnaps the boy. He dresses him as a girl and treats her as some kind of good omen in his bloody incursions with the racist militias of the area.

And so Onion finds himself dragged into some of the most dangerous and salacious moments in the stretch leading up to the Civil War. There are tense tête-a-têtes with future Confederate general Jeb Stuart (a hilariously charming Wyatt Russell), gory recreations of Brown’s raids, and a bizarre domestic farce involving Daveed Diggs’s Frederick Douglass, his proud wife, and his German feminist lover. You get not only a glimpse of the social unrest that led to the Civil War, but you also learn wild facts left out of your AP history course. (Facts like, yeah, Frederick Douglass had a wild personal life.)

I would describe The Good Lord Bird as a historical drama for the people who might not think they like history. Personally, I love history, but that’s because I’m obsessed with the quirky details of figures long past. Too often figures like Brown are reduced to dates in a text book or places like Harper’s Ferry. Even more often they are debated as all good or all evil. The Good Lord Bird, however, paints Brown as both a good guy and a bad guy. He’s absolutely right that slavery is one of the most disgustingly evil sins. He’s also egocentric, unhinged, and unbending. In fact, it is his own black and white interpretation of morality that causes additional problems for him, Onion, his sons, and the nation as a whole.

But that’s not why it’s so good. The Good Lord Bird is able to thread the needle on its complex depiction of Brown because it puts humor first and foremost. The Good Lord Bird is downright hysterically funny. Onion is an irreverently unfazed narrator. Henry just wants to survive at all costs, and that means going along with Brown and his insane schemes. He has no concept of the weight of the historic figures circling around him. Onion only sees them as quirky characters impeding his opportunities to get his next square meal. (Episode 3 is titled “Mr. Fred” over a comic moment where Onion insults Frederick Douglass by not being awed by him.)

The thing about The Good Lord Bird is that it’s not a slog. It’s an electrifying sprint through one of the most traumatic times in American history, and you’re laughing all the way. The tone of the show is more Tarantino than Roots, and yet The Good Lord Bird handles the horrors of slavery with utter pathos. I’m not sure how it works, but I know that it does?

The Good Lord Bird is something miraculous. Heck, it’s almost as special as a good lord bird.

Where to stream The Good Lord Bird