The Foundering Fathers


HBO has made John Adams a lot less lovable than Tony Soprano and, despite all the critical tiptoeing around it, picked a poor time to demythologize the making of the American miracle.

In this week’s next-to-last installment, a sour, surly Adams slips out of a half-finished, half-furnished White House to board a crowded jitney and avoid attending the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson, a former friend he has come to envy and despise.

This is a typical moment in seven hours of relentless “realism” to offset a century of Hollywood biopics that glorified the Founding Fathers beyond human recognition and now attempts to balance the books by presenting them warts and all but ends up with a visually spectacular exhibition of warts.

It was only in middle age that, as a child of immigrants, I fell deeply in love with the makers of the American Revolution while touring the stately homes of England to view huge tapestries celebrating ancestral slaughter that created a ruling aristocracy who passed along generations of splendor to a few who live at the expense of misery for the many.

Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Franklin fought a war to escape all that and, by some miracle, found a way not to replicate it but create something magnificently new in history that endures to this day.

That they were vain, petty, self-seeking–in a word, human–is not surprising, but a televised tapestry of their faults is no more a cause for self-congratulation than the wall hangings in those palaces built on exploitation.

What the peerless Laura Linney as Abigail Adams keeps warning about in pillow talk would have been helpful to the producers of the HBO epic. “Ambition,” she keeps saying sadly. “Vanity.”

Cross-posted from my blog.

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April 15th, 2008
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Viewing 2 Comments

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    I was kind of sad when I missed the first installment of this, but after what I've read (from you and others), I think I'm better off. Thanks for helping me dodge a tv dud!
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    Well, I'm on a completely different page.

    John Adams is the only appointment TV in my house this spring not only for myself, but also for my wife and my 16 year old.

    Seeing what was truely the "greatest generation" brought to life, seeing the revolution era on screen, and seeing those men and that era treated not as an ivory carved myth to be protected but as a bloody, political and very real drama, its just fantastic, I wish it were an ongoing series. At the end of each episode both my daughter and I look at each other and wish there were more.

    That Adams was prickly, sour, ambitious, and self-important, are pretty much all facts of history...that he was smoldering center of a political revolution that changed the world was also true. The show embraces both visions beautifully.

    Sure, at times, the show falls into the trap of "Law and Order" style dialogue that sounds like exposition of background instead of sounding like the way people speak.

    And there seem to be two kinds of people when it comes to Laura Linney, those who find her "peerless" and those, like me, who she just rubs the wrong way for some reason that it's hard for me to articulate.
 

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