Sterling K. Brown's 'Washington Black' Sports All-British Co-Stars

Once upon a time, high-end British series that aired in the U.S. were almost uniformly period/costume dramas. But the last decade hasn't just seen a surge in British programming crossing the pond; it's also seen a shift in British tastes. Until the mid-1980s, the BBC made multiple period dramas a year; nowadays, viewers are lucky to get more than one out of Auntie Beeb. ITV, UKTV, Sky, and Channels 4 and 5 have stepped up, but it's still a massive drop in overall numbers. One is likelier to find an American-made costume drama that hired all the usual BBC suspects, like Washington Black, the new period drama starring American Sterling K. Brown (American Fiction), that will stream on Hulu come July 2025.

Brown is one of American TV's most decorated actors, and his work with series creator Dan Fogelman on hits like Paradise and This Is Us has made him a household name and a powerful Hollywood player. He's certainly not the first actor to parlay that clout into getting passion projects made. Still, there are "passion projects" like Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which are as much vanity projects as anything else. Then there are passion projects like Washington Black, which rescue parts of Black/Indigenous American history that have been overlooked (or worse, covered up) by white historians, made to educate the public and celebrate forgotten history.

Based on the novel Washington Black by Canadian author Esi Edugyan, Brown stars as the titular Washington Black, called Wash by his friends, born into slavery on Barbados, whose intelligence lands him a way off the island and on a globe-spanning journey of self-discovery. Though Washington Black did not exist, his story is based on historical research Edugyan did into the Tichborne case, inspired by her discovery of the story of a plantation slave sent to Australia to identify one of the claimants.