Season two of runaway slave drama Underground (WGN, 2016–17) features a showcase episode consisting entirely of a monologue from Harriet Tubman. The hero of the Underground Railroad is giving a speech to abolitionists that builds to a passionate call to arms against the system of chattel slavery (02: 06). In a programme built around dynamic action, the episode's physical stillness and singular focus on Black female voice makes a spectacle of Tubman's political rhetoric. The monologue brings to the foreground Underground's tracing of connections between the antebellum South and contemporary American politics. This is made explicit in the episode's closing moments when Tubman's determined gaze shifts to direct address (a non-naturalistic device otherwise absent from the programme). She breaks the fourth wall to align the audience with the abolitionists in her final call for action. Evoking the nostalgia of the Republican sloganeering of President Trump, she declaims, ‘You gotta find what it means for you to be a soldier. Beat back those that are tryin’ to kill everything that's good and right in the world and call it “makin’ it great again”.’ The episode concludes with Tubman's challenge, “Aint nobody get to sit this out, y’hear me”; the war for the freedom of enslaved Black Americans is directly connected to a contemporary fight for America's soul.

This striking moment of non-naturalism presents a didactic illustration of period drama's investment in social and political concerns. In these moments period drama builds connections between the present and the past, rather than presenting the past as a ‘foreign country’, eroticising or fetishising its difference, or viewing it as a more settled world to escape to. Television outlets frequently commission literary adaptions and original dramas whose plots can be read through current cultural and political preoccupations. This can sometimes be accidental, as when The Americans's (FX, 2013–18) story of Russian spies working undercover in 1980s America became unexpectedly topical with the exposure of Russia's interference in the 2016 US elections (Jeffries 2017). Period drama looks to the past to explain our present or makes a ‘foreign’ past recognisable by connecting the audience's own experiences to the events that shape its characters’ lives. Here history is not a linear journey towards ‘progress’ but a form of echo chamber.