Tomorrow is Juneteenth, the not-yet-federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States, and HBO is putting together a collection of premium programming from Black creators and/or centering on Black characters that everyone can watch for free. The big highlight is Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen, which serves as a sequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ famous graphic novel and centers on Regina King as a mask-wearing cop in 2019 Oklahoma. If you haven’t watched it, saying too much about why it’s a good choice for Juneteenth weekend would involve spoilers, but we’ll just say… it’s a good choice for Juneteenth weekend, especially given what’s going on in the real world with protests against police violence and racial injustice. Also the ending is really—ahem—powerful.
The full series will air on HBO starting tomorrow afternoon, and you’ll also be able to watch all of them for free on HBO’s on-demand platforms from June 19 to June 21. Once again, though, HBO is offering a bunch of stuff for free for longer, specifically:
Being Serena
Bessie
Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley
The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks
United Skates
Jerrod Carmichael’s Home Videos
Lil’ Rel Live In Crenshaw
The Apollo
The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency (season one, episode one)
The Shop (season two, episode one and season two, episode six)
Treme (season one, episode one)
True Detective (season three, episode one)
That’s on top of things that are already offered as free samples, like Baltimore Rising, Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas, Notes From The Field, King In The Wilderness, 4 Little Girls, We Are The Dream, Say Her Name: The Life & Death Of Sandra Bland, and select episodes of stuff like Euphoria, Ballers, Insecure, Betty, and A Black Lady Sketch Show. That stuff will be free from June 19 to July 2.
17 Comments
I barely remember the Watchmen movie but this series was fantastic. I put it second only to Chernobyl and ahead of Band of Brothers in my list of top mini-series’.
Just rewatched the ‘Juneteenth’ episode of ‘Atlanta’ last night, and holy shit, it’s so good. So much amazing dialogue, but one of my favorite bits is when Earn and Van are talking to the preacher, and he’s going on and on about respecting your woman. When he’s done, Earn turns to the preacher’s wife and says, ‘And what was your name?’It’s an amazing episode of a spectacular season of a phenomenal series. And the choice of the song at the end could not be more perfect.
I don’t know if there’s even been a finer Donald Glover line delivery than “this thing called slavery happened, and my entire cultural identity was erased”
Aces. The way he keeps shutting down Van’s stepfather is pretty incredible, too.‘Is this Hennessey?’
Also, you can read all of Truth: Red, White, and Black for free over at Marvel Unlimited for free. It’s the story of the first black Captain America.
So it will it be up on HBO’s website?
Yes:
https://www.hbo.com/watchmen
Watch TV on Juneteenth.It is the best possible way to celebrate and remember the emancipated, their history, and their struggles and victories, out of every single possible way.This comment was brought to you by Sarcasm®.Sarcasm®: for when you want to seem smart while not giving a shit.
Serious question: Was Juneteenth a thing people talked about further back than a few years ago?As a non-American, I’d never heard of it, and initially thought Black-ish had made it up when they did their episode on it.
Of course not Trump invented it (/s)Washington(CNN)President Donald Trump is seeking to take credit for making Juneteenth — a day commemorating the end of slavery in the United States — “very famous,” after rescheduling his first rally since the start of the pandemic to avoid further criticism for seeming to co-opt it.
Trump told The Wall Street Journal that “nobody had ever heard of” the holiday before he brought it up.https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/18/politics/donald-trump-juneteenth-credit/index.html
non-american here (but lived there for about 15 years). i hadn’t heard about it before i lived there. it’s been around for a long time.
i don’t know how widespread it’s observed across the country, but the black communities i lived in and worked with in new england always had some type of remembrance/celebration.
It’s a Texas thing. I grew up on the Gulf Coast, just a few miles from Galveston. It was a big deal. We’d have a cookout with ALL the neighbors every year.
I knew about it as a kid, but for the wrong reasons: it was always in the news over all the partying and property destruction that would happen in Atlanta on Juneteenth. For a long time I thought it was just a “black spring break” that got out of hand each year. It wasn’t until about 20 years ago that I learned what it was really about and why people celebrate so heartily.
Ralph Ellison’s novel increased awareness of it pretty dramatically:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth_(novel)
It was a pretty big deal when they published it in 1999 (posthumously), since his first novel was so seminal and he never published a second.
It’s been part of African-American culture forever. White people didn’t know about it so much.
Yeah, as a white dude I always saw it as sort of like someone else’s wedding anniversary—i.e., It’s clearly important to you, but also clearly your thing and not mine, so I guess I’m not expected to keep close track of it.
I’m guessing the fact that it’s a day celebrating the end of slavery, in a country still predominantly controlled by a white supremacy-based power structure, is probably why it’s not widely heard of until very recently.