![‘Good Lord Bird’: Ethan Hawke Is Delightfully Unhinged In Showtime’s New Abolitionist Series [Review]](https://cooncel.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/good-lord-bird-ethan-hawke-is-delightfully-unhinged-in-showtimes-new-abolitionist-series-review_5f721b4e454f4.jpeg "‘Good Lord Bird’: Ethan Hawke Is Delightfully Unhinged In Showtime’s New Abolitionist Series [Review]")
Did John Brown, the infamous abolitionist who led the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, really take a cross-dressing teenage slave under his wing and name him Onion? No, not at all. “The Good Lord Bird,” which never purports itself as a true retelling, opens each episode with the tagline “All of this is true. Most of it happened.” Usually playing with the past, especially with a history as traumatizing as America’s original sin, slavery, can quickly go left. Just look at “Antebellum.” But creators Ethan Hawke and Mark Richard’s seven-episode Showtime miniseries, based on James McBride’s novel of the same title, just barely glides over the unavoidable traps. Instead, “The Good Lord Bird” is a wickedly funny take on an enigmatic man whose zealotry to the cause of freedom led to the most important event in American history next to the Civil War.