Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins to Write and Direct “Underground Railroad” Series

Blogged by @hshtgmike

Coming straight off of a successful awards season run, “Moonlight” co-writer and director, Barry Jenkins, is set to write and direct a limited series for Amazon, based on Colson Whitehead’s best-selling book, “The Underground Railroad.”

The novel centers around a young slave woman who, in an attempt to find the Underground Railroad, discovers an actual underground network of trains, tracks, and conductors operating beneath the Georgian soil.

Jenkins calls the novel “a groundbreaking work that pays respect to our nation’s history while using the form to explore it in a thoughtful and original way. Preserving the sweep and grandeur of a story like this requires bold, innovative thinking and in Amazon, we’ve found a partner whose reverence for storytelling and freeness of form is wholly in line with our vision.”

Jenkins is also writing a film about Olympic boxing champion Claressa “T-Rex” Shields for Universal and recently helmed an episode of upcoming the “Dear White People” series for Netflix.

Currently, there is no set release date for the project. Will you be tuning in upon its release?