On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television Birth of a Nation By Marvin Kitman I HAVE ALWAYS been in awe of David McCullough. I especially admire his sales. The same could be said, I guess, of Filene’s Basement....
...Ultimately, The Adams Chronicles were to successful drama what the Articles of Confederation were to the Constitution...
...Even worse, the enterprise almost bankrupted WNET/13, the producing public TV station, prompting the governor-generals there to scrap the costly production apparatus that was supposed to help Channel 13 learn the art of making BBCstyle serials...
...They had beautiful pictures of houses and the latest decorator colors in Williamsburg...
...Hmm,” Adams might say about the HBO series, “I like it—232 years later, they finally got it right...
...All this before the Mass Turnpike was built...
...For some, David Morse was a perfect George Washington, despite his nose...
...What it did best was portray the relationship between Mr...
...The characters were as wooden as the genuine Shaker furniture...
...Another reason for my wariness about the HBO venture was that I made the mistake of reading a pre-review by New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley...
...One can understand the delegates’ caution as they felt the noose tightening...
...Danny Huston, who played Samuel Adams, bore an uncanny resemblance to Roger Clemens testifying before the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee...
...Stanley, I concluded, must be a closet monarchist bent on undermining the numbers for HBO...
...It was as if the grant people—especially the National Endowment for the Inhumanities—were sitting on the writers’ hands as they typed...
...But he has written such outstanding books as The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge (about the Brooklyn Bridge), The Path Between the Seas (about the Panama Canal), and Truman...
...It left potential viewers afraid to start the series...
...Jack Gould, the founding father of TV criticism at the Times, used to say the trouble with the medium was that it did not have enough opera...
...Adams vomiting at sea and the letting of his blood on land...
...Franklin then smote General Washington and out sprung his white horse...
...The Times has a long tradition of TV critics who don’t get it...
...The aroma of the strontium 90 is still in the air every time I see somebody in knickers and a white wig...
...Why must history always be turned into bad T V, I found myself thinking as I anticipated HBO’s entry into the toxic zone created by public television...
...Abby puts her arm around his shoulder...
...Colonel Henry Knox is seen dragging the famous cannons from Ticonderoga past the Adams house in Braintree—in broad daylight...
...In all her scenes Linney rubricated the collaborative nature of their partnership...
...The only person who seemed to be mufkeying around, I would discover, was Benjamin Franklin...
...If Giamatti is not William Daniels, who has owned the role since 1776, he is right up there with George Grizzard of The Adams Chronicles...
...The three of them—Franklin, Washington and the horse—then won the Revolution and did all the politics and diplomacy...
...My favorite absolutely ridiculous scene historically: Adams, hearing something is doing at Lexington and Concord, jumps on his horse and arrives in time to cradle a dying Minuteman, then gets back on his horse, rides like the wind across Massachusetts and reaches Braintree before sunset...
...He is the right size and has the right tone: grumpy, obnoxious and loquacious to a fault...
...One of Stanley’s predecessors, John J. O’Connor, seemed to review public TV exclusively...
...There was a great scene depicting Ben in Paris playing chess in a bathtub with a countess for three hours...
...the prosthetic device made him look like a clown...
...Everything had to be from a scrap of paper in the archives, no matter how stilted it might sound today...
...Hear, hear,” I said to myself, rapping my virtual cane...
...I may be mistaken about that last brood...
...The highlight of her review was a vicious attack on Giamatti as Adams...
...A. One scene in particular illustrated this: John is at the desk late at night...
...HBO’s hype machine even had posters put up in my local post office, next to the Most Wanted mug shots...
...A and Mrs...
...Knowing a little about him from the days I spent as an armchair historian doing research for my The Making of the Prefident 1789, I feel safe in saying McCullough keeps the chaff and throws out the wheat...
...It’s not TV, they kept reminding us, it’s HBO...
...It was rumored that he had a TV set with only one channel on its dial (13), lent to him by WNET/13...
...It was hard to concentrate on 13 episodes of the most narcoleptic series in the annals of television...
...McCullough’s focus is on John Adams’ character: He is brave, irritable, has a volcanic temper, but is lovable...
...With that kind of horsemanship, Adams could have won the war by himself plus the Kentucky Derby...
...a leg being cut off with a hacksaw...
...In Philadelphia, people who saw Adams approaching would run away to avoid another of his learned lectures on the Mesopotamian parliamentary structure...
...Rush: “This is how they are going to tell the story of the Revolution...
...John seemed to pop up at every important moment in history...
...So the word that HBO was making a $100 million “epic seven-part miniseries event” based on McCullough’s John Adams, to be produced by none other than Tom Hanks, filled me with trepidation...
...It was as if they had been saying, “I have only one wife to give for my country...
...Did that mean there would be lap dancing in the taverns...
...Adams in bed with Abigail...
...History-impaired, she wouldn’t even come into the screening room to see an unconvincing Adams...
...The Chronicles were what could be called coffee-table TV...
...It was like shutting down the Rouge River Plant in Dearborn, Michigan during World War II after the first B24 bomber rolled off the assembly line...
...Too many really fascinating aspects of Adams’ life are missing...
...A used bookstore man told me that in all the copies of John Adams coming into his shop, he rarely finds a bookmark beyond the third chapter...
...One wondered how those colonial wenches could do it with those enormous bustles...
...MY FEARS, in other words, were largely unjustified...
...The war part, however, was not as violent as that earlier HBO family saga, The Sopranos...
...There was more than you ever want to see about what those smallpox inoculations were really like...
...He probably had a cleanliness obsession...
...Like Zelig, he just happened to be in the square for the Boston Massacre...
...I should also mention that he is a politician, although the book doesn’t tell us much about Adams’ ideas, let alone his passion for writing a Constitution and fashioning a government...
...I never thought it would happen...
...Clearly the continuity person didn’t know that Braintree was 30 miles southeast of the battlefield...
...His John Adams, though, has a braindead quality that I first noticed in his 1776...
...Fortunately, Hanks and the epic’s other producers and writers appear never to have watched PBS while growing up...
...The writing by Kirk Ellis was a bit overwrought...
...She was a symbol as well of the pain inflicted on the long-suffering wives of the workaholics who founded this nation...
...The first two episodes accurately captured the tedium of the debates about the Olive Branch Petition versus declaring independence...
...But my complaints are a quibble alongside the really important contribution HBO made to Adams TV scholarship...
...She is not the little woman saying, “You’re my hero...
...As the March 16 debut date grew near, I was in a state of panic...
...It was much better, too, than The Adams Chronicles, that landmark 1976 Emmy and Peabody Award-winning series dramatizing the lives of not only John and Abigail but seemingly every Adams that ever lived, including The Addams Family...
...But Stanley may be a new low in a field that has no bottom...
...It was also a treat to watch Laura Linney as John’s Dear Abby...
...ADMITTEDLY, things got off to a slow start...
...But the experience was like watching an antique show where the chair talks to the table...
...Many others apparently share my view...
...First, he would not have been wasting his time watching T V. But I recall Adams’ sardonic complaint to Dr...
...And, by the way, he also writes some music...
...In short, McCullough’s 736-page John Adams is high on my list of all-time best-selling Pulitzer Prize-winning duds...
...Actually, Giamatti is brilliant...
...All this was made possible by the writing...
...One case I know was my wife...
...What’s wrong with the book was explained to me by historian R. B. Bernstein (Thomas Jefferson): “Imagine a biography of Beethoven where we learn he is grumpy, struggles against various problems in his life, including deafness, yet manages to triumph over adversity...
...The series contained a few other foradults-only moments...
...The McCullough is coming, the McCullough is coming,” I could hear Paul Revere shouting...
...The HBO epic, starring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney, proved to be a big improvement on the book...
...Franklin smote the ground with his lightning rod and out came General Washington...
...Perhaps there would be Liberty Pole dancing...
...Franklin...
...What would Adams have thought of this John Adams...
...And Tom Wilkinson gave an amazing performance as dear Dr...
...What she says is, “Okay, John, what are you writing...
...I love you, right or wrong...
Vol. 91 • March 2008 • No. 2
