As far as politicians go, Lyndon Baines Johnson was the boss hog. Just as he had in his days in the Senate, President Johnson would take to strong-arming his agenda past any suit unlucky enough to cross him, using everything from trapping folks in an elevator to whipping out his own President Johnson (aka “Jumbo”) and waving it at adversaries to imaginably stupefying effect.
Before anyone says anything, yes. Yes, Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle really were a real life twosome, albeit an unlikely one. Doyle, despite making his fortune on the dependably logical Sherlock Holmes saga, was an avowed spiritualist, drawn toward the occult after a number of personal tragedies. Houdini, on the other hand, the rock star illusionist and escape artist, knew humbug when he heard it, spending a good chunk of his career ousting phony mediums and their “powers.”
You wouldn’t think sex and scandal could ever mesh with slavery on a would-be legacy series. You wouldn’t be wrong, either, but because peak TV rewards risk, here’s giving credit where credit is due. To its credit, Underground, WGN America’s newest breath into the original programming bubble, works hard to slip a sleek cable skin over everything ugly about America’s darkest chapter (if a chapter can last 250 years). Feats that big fall hard, though, and the difficult legacy the show shoulders means that every misstep it takes stands to cripple it.