Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Lincoln’s Dilemma’ On Apple TV+, A Docuseries About Abraham Lincoln’s Complex Road To Emancipating America’s Enslaved People

Presidents’ Day weekend brings us not one but two docuseries takes on Abraham Lincoln’s legacy, especially with regards to his significant role in emancipating America’s enslaved people and abolishing the institution from the country. The first of the two series, Lincoln’s Dilemma, really focuses in on how the divide over slavery led up to not only Lincoln’s election but the Civil War itself, and how Lincoln’s viewpoints and politics on the matter weren’t quite what everyone was taught in school.

LINCOLN’S DILEMMA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Scenes from the January 6, 2021 insurrection on the Capital.

The Gist: What does showing the Jan. 6 insurrection have to do with Abraham Lincoln? The four-part docuseries Lincoln’s Dilemma explains that pretty quickly. The divisions in this country are reminiscent of the divisions that ripped the country apart leading up to the Civil War. And considering Lincoln spent his presidency trying to preserve democracy, his rise to the office, as well as his presidency itself, might serve to illustrate what sort of leadership is needed now.

The first episode of the series, narrated by Jeffrey Wright and directed by Jacqueline Olive and Barak Goodman, starts with Lincoln’s post-election train trip from Springfield, Illinois to Washington, DC ahead of his 1861 inauguration, a ride that was circuitous because of threats to his life. We hear writings from Lincoln, voiced by Bill Camp, that talk about his hatred of slavery and the particularly precarious national mood as he enters the presidency. Some of the threats against him are so severe, he has to travel in disguise.

We then go back a bit to the ways enslaved people did rebel against their owners, Douglass’ rise in prominence, and Lincoln’s legal and political career, including one term in Congress where he railed against the Spanish-American War. What we see in these years is Lincoln’s distaste for the institution of slavery, but it’s clear that he’s not an abolitionist; he was against the spread of slavery north and into the new territories the U.S. was acquiring. This led him to looking weak in the eyes of people like Douglass when he ran for the presidency in 1860. But his folksy manner and moderate views made him the most attractive candidate of the then-new Republican party.

The docuseries uses Camp to voice Lincoln’s writing and Leslie Odom Jr. to voice the writing of Fredrick Douglass, an escaped slave who became an orator and writer, and who was arguably more famous than Lincoln when Lincoln took office, plus other voices representing other writings from the time. There is some sepia-toned graphical reenactments, but the docuseries uses mostly archival photos and documents. Experts interviewed include historians Edna Greene Medford, Kellie Carter Jackson and Christopher Bonner.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? There have been a number of recent docuseries about Lincoln that revisit his view on slavery with a modern lens. There’s the upcoming History docuseries/drama hybrid Abraham Lincoln, and CNN’s recent series Lincoln: Divided We Stand.

Our Take: Because the two series are coming out so close together, we watched Lincoln’s Dilemma and Abraham Lincoln pretty much concurrently, and their early episodes cover a lot of the same ground. But Lincoln’s Dilemma takes a more straightforward approach to the topic, not diving as much into Lincoln’s upbringing and keeping the storytelling gadgetry to a minimum. While it seems that it would make for a drier show, quite the opposite happens: The straightforward approach makes Lincoln’s Dilemma a dramatic and compelling watch.

It could be that we’re fascinated with the topic of revisiting Lincoln and seeing him not as the “Great Emancipator” but as a complex man who had the foresight to move emancipation along despite the fact that he didn’t necessarily think that slavery as an institution should be abolished. He knew the reality of the divisions tearing the country apart and figured that working to stop the expansion of the institution would effectively cut it off and let it wither on the vine. But the relatively recent movement to bring the image of Lincoln back down to earth makes for a topic that’s full of drama, and not just because the pre-Civil War period has a lot of parallels to right now.

What Lincoln’s Dilemma is good at is getting to the point. There is even a moment where Medford pointedly explains that the Democratic and Republican parties of the 1860s are basically opposite in ideology to the way the parties are now. It’s that kind of simple context that helps bring the viewer right into the history as it’s happening and equate it to what might be going on now.

As the season goes on and we get into Lincoln’s wartime presidency, how he got to writing the Emancipation Proclamation, how it only started the process of emancipation, and the forces that conspired to end his life at the other end of John Wilkes Booth’s gun will be interesting to explore.

Parting Shot: Journalist Jelani Cobb actually points out exactly what we mention just above, how the process of emancipation went too fast for a lot of people, “as evidenced by what happened at Ford’s Theater in April of 1865.”

Sleeper Star: The team doing the graphical work on the recreations does a stellar job, taking existing photos and drawings and adapting to moving graphics.

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Lincoln’s Dilemma take an unflinching look at Lincoln’s role in the abolition of slavery in America, and isn’t shy about criticizing him, or at least putting his role — and his conflicted politics — in the right context.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.