Reviving John Adams: Will HBO's miniseries inspire new love for America's founding?

Library of Congress

John Adams: Revolutionary, president... movie star?

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Reviving John Adams: Will HBO's miniseries inspire new love for America's founding?

Can Hollywood make America's famously dour second president hip? Tom Hanks and Paul Giamatti certainly hope so. HBO this weekend will premiere its miniseries on John Adams.

In Adams, Giamatti discovered a complicated, often contradictory soul. "I went in thinking Adams was boring. He's anything but," he says. "I found him fantastically complicated. He was accessible ... but a contradiction — constantly questioning his own motives. He was vain, but he despised himself. He was at war with himself. He was kind of a mess."

Can modern Hollywood give Americans the true measure of an 18th century figure like Adams? Will the mini-series spark new interest in America's founders?

Ben likes: The unlovable Mr. Adams

Forrest McDonald/Claremont Review of Books

Adams's signal contributions were insufficient to overcome the personal traits that made it virtually impossible to regard him as lovable. Adams was irascible, pigheaded, self-righteous, bigoted, envious, rigid, egotistical, and self-pitying. He was wont to bore people with complaints of various forms of physical malaise. Benjamin Franklin described Adams as being crazy some of the time; others, including Harrison Gray Otis, less generously thought him insane all the time. For these and other reasons, though I have known many students of history who admire Adams, I have never over the years encountered anyone who actually liked him.

Until now.

Joel likes: The divider

Jill Lepore/The New Yorker

At its best, the storytelling itself manages to accommodate a sense of historical contingency. American independence was not inevitable.

But the bigger problem is how far the writing has to go to make Adams both more important and more virtuous than everyone around him except his wife, as if to justify his prodigious self-regard and disdain for his contemporaries. Adams didn’t “unite the states of America,” but he accomplished a hell of a lot. He was bold. He was brilliant. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t also a heel.