(My only quibble is whether the series was turned "into farce". Although
I haven't seen it yet, I have read the novel it is based on and can
assure you that it meant as farce from the outset. If a white author
wrote the novel, it would have been bashed just like William Styron's
novel about Nat Turner.)
Hawkes’ Brown is quite a different figure. He mistakes Henry, the young,
freed slave for a servant girl and has him parade around in a skirt,
until, in the end, Brown turns the charade into an LGBT acceptance
moment. Brown is seen mostly as a raving lunatic, compared by Hawkes to
Shakespeare’s Lear, with Hawkes for much of the series playing Brown, as
he attempts to free slaves in Kansas, as Lear’s mad scene on the moor.
In episode two he shows up at the end to rescue Henry, who he calls
Onion, rambling insanely with guns a-blazing, turning what was an astute
description of racial exploitation from the point of view of Henry and
the other African-Americans in one Kansas town, into farce.
https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/culture/tv/item/3584-john-brown-as-buffoon-in-the-good-lord-bird-vs-brown-as-radical-in-underground
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