Yet John Adams’ lack of an obvious “hook” and sales-pitchy themes of the kind we’ve come to expect from American TV is a big part of what makes John Adams great. It’s one of the few depictions of the American revolution that treats the founding fathers as people, whose particular hang-ups and fractious personalities informed the republic they were building. And even “the republic they were building” is gilding the lily a bit—a situation had come to a head and they were trying to deal with it. Even Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit play about the other forgotten founding father, gives its subject the hero treatment (there’s no specific evidence for this, but it’s fun to treat Hamilton as Miranda’s revisionist response to John Adams, which mostly depicted Alexander Hamilton, played in HBO’s version by Rufus Sewell, as a proto-imperialist schemer).
Maybe John Adams needed a British director, who might have treated America’s independence as anything but “destiny”—a foregone conclusion, the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, etc.—as so many American storytellers tend to do. The show’s longest episode is its second, clocking in at a full 92 minutes, covering the Second Continental Congress and the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. It is long, drab, and shot mostly indoors, but it conveys the history without polishing it into a postcard. All these sweaty, verbose, be-wigged fancy men (with terrible teeth) had a real dilemma on their hands: whether to pick a fight, try to compromise, or beg for mercy, with their own gruesome executions as the stakes for a wrong choice. Anyone who has ever had a bone to pick with a boss can relate, in our own cowardly-by-comparison ways.
Throughout, it’s the memorable characterizations that make John Adams sing, from pragmatic Abby Adams (Linney, in her best role) to Danny Huston—who’s theatrical to the point that he can basically only play larger-than-life characters, but excels at them—as Adams’ blowhard cousin, Samuel. We get Clancy O’Connor as South Carolina’s lisping, loyalist-leaning fop, Edward Rutledge; Tom Wilkinson giving the definitive portrayal of Adams’ wiser, more tactful better angel, Ben Franklin; Stephen Dillane, a few years away from playing Stannis Baratheon on Game of Thrones, as the taciturn romantic Thomas Jefferson; Justin Theroux as cocksure rich guy John Hancock; and David Morse as the quiet mensch who effortlessly commands respect, George Washington. Once you’ve seen John Adams, it’s basically impossible to imagine Ben Franklin without picturing Wilkinson or Thomas Jefferson without picturing Dillane. Performances that embed themselves in your brain like these are the ultimate mark of quality.
Throughout the show, two themes shine through: the costs of doing the right thing, and the way people who love and respect each other can still disagree (or is it the other way—that people who disagree can still love each other.) Is Adams a disagreeable prick because he’s so often right, or so often right because doing the right thing so often requires a disagreeable prick? His stubborn, unbending nature makes him just the guy America needs to keep them out of a disastrous war with Napoleon’s France, but also kind of a nightmare to his children and in-laws, who he refuses to do any favors for, being both the beau ideal of a New England Puritan and the personification of why other people dislike New England Puritans. He’s voluble, constantly going overboard in fits of passion, and transparently falsely modest, with all his worst qualities leavened by the fact that he’s as acutely aware of them as his worst detractors, and visibly pained by it—a mix of qualities maybe only Paul Giamatti could play.
