John Adams Review

Kirk Ellis's scripts, from David McCullough's biography, begin with Adams defending the British soldiers of the Boston Massacre and end fifty-six years later at his farm, and the decision to present a difficult, vain, principled man rather than a marble founder is the series' best idea. Tom Hooper, years before The King's Speech, films the Continental Congress as a room of sweating, bickering men and the French court as a place where Adams is out of his depth.

Paul Giamatti's casting divided critics, some of whom found him too crabbed to carry seven parts, but he gives Adams's vanity and courage equal weight and won the Emmy, as did Laura Linney, whose Abigail is the moral centre, and Tom Wilkinson for his sly Benjamin Franklin. Stephen Dillane's cool Jefferson and David Morse's imposing Washington are exactly right, and Ellis won an Emmy for the writing.

The production won thirteen Emmys, a record for a miniseries, and Tak Fujimoto and Danny Cohen shot it beautifully in Virginia and Hungary. But Hooper's canted, restless camera gets wearing, and the late episodes on the presidency move at the pace of a textbook.