Scarcely an hour long, this treatment of Denmark Vesey's failed anti-enslavement uprising in Charleston, South Carolina is a masterful bit of historically-informed character work. A cross-section of free and enslaved Blacks, brought to three-dimensional life by legends like Kotto, Little, Peters, and the show-stealing Casey and Fargas, have no time to waste in their intellectual and emotional assault on the circumstances of post-Haitian Revolution Charleston. Their perspectives are diverse and complex yet perfectly clear, and the same is true of the perverse world they inhabit, all conveyed by screenwriter William Hauptman with the confidence of one who knows the material deeply enough to explain it simply. Not at all hurt by a made-for-TV budget, this is a finely-distilled example of history made immediate.
