The best part of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Underground Railroad (2016) is the way he overturns the oft-repeated mantra of grade-school teachers everywhere, who said, No, the Underground Railroad wasn’t, in fact, a railroad. In his book, which chronicles a former slave’s flight from the Antebellum South, the Underground Railroad is a real thing. Now, Barry Jenkins, the Academy Award-winning director of Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, adapts the story for an equally masterful, if utterly wrenching, television series. —J.V.