Esi Edugyan’s 2018 novel, “Washington Black,” takes the form of a picaresque, sending its precocious hero — whom we first meet as a 10- or 11-year-old enslaved worker on a Barbados sugar plantation — on a linear journey from one place to the next: Virginia, the Arctic, Nova Scotia, London, Africa. Each stop is the scene of another stage in his growth, and in his escape — part realistic slave narrative, part magical Jules Verne-like epic — from the restrictions placed on a young Black man in the mid-19th century.
In the new mini-series adapted from the book, which premiered Wednesday on Hulu, Edugyan’s traditional structure runs head-on into the demands of streaming storytelling, where each episode — eight in this case — must wax and wane and provide variety like a self-contained drama.
So like many novels, good and bad, Edugyan’s has been chopped and diced and tossed like a salad, and Hulu’s “Washington Black” jumps to and fro among plot points and places: from a brutal plantation to a frozen wilderness, from an escape by a lighter-than-air flying machine to a drawing-room debate.
This is so typical of streaming drama that it hardly seems worth mentioning, but it matters more than usual in this case. For one thing, Edugyan’s book (a finalist for the Booker Prize) is good — tough-minded, poetic and powerful. If you were sufficiently moved by it to want to adapt it, why wouldn’t you want to make something that gave a truer sense of how the novel worked?
Then there’s a more particular consideration: As the book progresses, the consciousness of its protagonist, who goes by Wash, grows more nuanced and complex. That’s the organizing principle; the structure is there for a reason. Without it, there’s a lot of moving around but not much movement; a lot of plot but not much dramatic momentum.
Some of that slack can be taken up by the performances, and Hulu’s “Washington Black” offers several worth watching. The most engaging is that of the British teenager Eddie Karanja as the young Wash, an artistic and scientific prodigy whose progress toward freedom and wholeness is made possible by a series of intermediaries, some altruistic, some entirely self-interested. (Ernest Kingsley Jr. plays Wash as a young man.)
Iola Evans as the adult Wash’s love interest; Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine as a house porter on the plantation; Charles Dance as a single-minded scientist; and Sterling K. Brown as the leader of the Black community in Halifax, Nova Scotia, all make an impression. (Another characteristic example of how books are changed for the screen: Brown, the certified star whose production company bought the rights to the novel in 2019, is the first person we see and hear, even though he plays a supporting character at the midpoint of the story.)
And while glossy, eye-candy cinematography has become common to the point of overkill in streaming drama, “Washington Black” is notably pretty to look at. There are occasionally images, filmed on locations in Canada, Iceland and Mexico, that rise to the level of memorable.
That picturesqueness, though, and the insistently stirring score by Cameron Moody, reflect an overall sensibility that has taken material that could be called Dickensian and recast it in the spirit of Disney (the corporate parent of Hulu, coincidentally or not).
Brown, who is an executive producer, and the show’s creator, Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, have talked about their desire to move the story away from pain and suffering, which are at times depicted viscerally in the novel, and toward joy and wonder. An honest desire for positivity can be hard to distinguish from an impulse to do what you think an audience will want, however, and the visual and melodramatic pleasures of “Washington Black” are too often clouded by the haze of feel-good affirmation; the show’s ending, in particular, is a master class in betraying the spirit of your material. Wash takes to the air, but the show remains earthbound.
Mike Hale is a television critic for The Times. He also writes about online video, film and media.
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