Sage of the Small Screen: HBO's John Adams

If there is one thing that can bring America's squabbling academics to a consensus, it is television. So general is the academy's professed disdain for TV that one often gets the impression that if Ph.Ds had it our way, pictures broadcast through the air, like transfats, smoking in restaurants, low-mileage SUVs, and high fructose corn syrup, would be banned by the government (except of course for PBS—so academic!—and perhaps the BBC morning news—so, well, British!). If only TV would air quality programming, it could be such a force for good—as understood by professors. As it stands, scholars obsessed in their professional lives with the oppressed subaltern masses find TV too popular and common, too democratic and vulgar for their refined sensibilities.

The irony of that position would make a good sitcom, if TV executives and the general public found academics worthy of such a thing. And as someone who has voiced just such opinions before going off to watch Star Trek: Enterprise, I can only say that HBO, which has given us the Sopranos, Entourage, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, has answered the cries of America's intellectual classes in their adaptation of David McCullough's John Adams to the miniseries format. This seven-part series skillfully recreates the man and that era of turmoil between Adams's emergence as a major public figure during the trial that followed the Boston Massacre of March 1770 and his long retirement that ended with his death on July 4, 1826.

Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney as John and Abigail Adams. HBO Films, 2008.

Adams would seem on the surface of things to make a weak choice for small-screen stardom in 21st-century America. He was short, fat, and balding. By his own admission he was obnoxious and disliked. He never fully escaped his New England parochialism, which may be virtue or vice, depending on your point of view. He does not seem to have strayed from his wife and did not engage in any lurid affairs like, say, Jefferson or Hamilton did. Unlike Washington, he never took the field in a military engagement. Adams began his rise to fame by legally defending the British soldiers who had opened fire on a colonial mob in the incident we call the Boston Massacre. That seems like quite a few strikes against becoming an American television hero today.

There are several reasons, though, for why this series about such a man succeeds where almost every other attempt to capture the Revolutionary era on film has failed. HBO has come to tell his story after fifteen years of intense popular interest in the period driven by a host of founding father biographies by academics and popular writers. In other words, they understood there was an audience and spent accordingly. Adams was a complex man who deeply immersed himself in the great political and constitutional debates of his times. He was the driving force in pushing the Second Congress toward independence, and he was a central figure in the politics of the 1790s. Moreover, Adams's prolific correspondence, particularly with Jefferson in old age and with his spirited wife Abigail, reveals much of his inner soul. Adams's insecurities, his superb intellect and related arrogance, and a strong sense of compassion sometimes submerged beneath a prickly personality all come across in those letters. By the time of Adams's death in 1826, a colonial backwater had become a sprawling, powerful democracy in a series of dramatic, sometimes convulsive events. It may be the greatest political story of all time, but its diffuse nature makes it difficult to recapture on film apart from the life of an individual who, like Adams, lived through it.

The producers also started with the right raw material: David McCullough's biography. Some scholars are quick to criticize Mc Cullough's effort as lacking originality or being too celebratory of the American experience and too kind to Adams, but they miss the point. He is a fine writer, with a great eye for...