In a horrifying childhood scene, July is snatched from Kitty’s side, renamed Marguerite and groomed as a lady’s maid for the plantation owner’s sister, Caroline (Hayley Atwell, best known as Marvel’s Peggy Carter, darkly hilarious as a coddled woman who behaves like a toddler). Though it concentrates on July’s early adulthood in the 1830s, when she’s portrayed by versatile theater vet Tamara Lawrance as a canny survivor, The Long Song spans decades of her life, beginning with her birth to an enslaved woman, Kitty (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), who was pregnant by her white overseer. Such complexity is the essence of this incisive but unimaginatively adapted story, which subverts the overly simplistic binaries of bondage and liberty, oppressed and oppressor, abolitionist and enslaver.

Even after emancipation, we watch supposedly free Black Jamaicans harvest sugarcane in the same fields they worked before it, still supervised by white men with bullwhips. But, true to history, the triumph is brief. It’s an episode that at first appears to depict the fall of a brutal institution.

Later that night-at the precise moment when a guest is putting his hand up the skirt of the show’s protagonist, an enslaved woman named July, in a casual act of sexual assault-soldiers burst in with news of the revolt. “They lack any ability to organize themselves,” one man opines. At an 1831 holiday dinner in Jamaica, a debate arises among white plantation owners over the threat of slaves taking up arms against their masters. The Christmas Rebellion figures prominently in The Long Song, a three-part BBC miniseries, adapted from the late Jamaican-British author Andrea Levy’s acclaimed 2010 novel, that will make its U.S.

The long song novel