HBO has been heavily advertising its new miniseries on John Adams for quite some time now and even bought some ad space on various progressive blogs. For those of you who don’t know, the miniseries is based upon David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize winning book titled John Adams which is a great biography of our second president. So since I’m a history geek and am taking a class on the Revolutionary War this semester, I decided to watch parts one and two as they aired last night. I have to admit that I’m extremely glad that I did.
As I sat down to watch the show, I was convinced that this would be yet another series that glorified the colonists cause. When one of the first scenes in part one portrayed the Boston Massacre by showing some men and young boys who had been shot by British soldiers, my predictions seemed to be coming true. As the show continued, however, I was proven wrong as they began to show how some colonists were stretching the truth and seemed to be out of control in their rage against the British.
After the initial time that it takes to introduce characters and get the background story going, the show also does a good job at trying to portray the personal struggles that John Adams and some of the other founding fathers faced during the Revolution. For instance, part two gives you a glimpse into how everyone wasn’t jumping on the bandwagon to declare independence from Great Britain. It also included scenes that gave glimpses into how families also had to deal with various issues such as small pox in addition to the actual political topics of the day. I was pleased to see this because I think most people look back on the Revolutionary Period and think that everyone was strongly united in a cause to defeat an evil enemy colonists. The show helps to show that this wasn’t always the case.
Although there are some aspects of the historical account that I would like to see the show go into in greater depth, I do believe the miniseries does a great job of portraying an historical account of the Revolution in a way that also makes it entertaining. I’m hoping that this is going to continue during the final five parts of the miniseries. The first two parts are going to be re-aired at various points in time throughout the week, but each new part will be aired on Sundays at 9pm EST. Even if you’re not a history geek like me, I highly recommend watching HBO’s miniseries on John Adams.
Filed under: Entertainment
Thanks for the review, Bryan. I don’t have a TV, so, um, haven’t been watching it, but as a Constitutional Law student, I was quite interested in seeing it. Guess I’ll have to put it on my Netflix queue.
I was watching the HBO series John Adams tonight and there was a nod at George Washington’s false teeth. It made me laugh because I remembered that those teeth are on display in Baltimore at The National Museum of Dentistry. Not only that, the map that the American delegation in France used to identify the United States of America at the Treaty of Paris, the actual map from George III’s library, is on display at the Maps exhibitions running at The Walters Art Museum. Check it out http://www.visitmybaltimore.com/video/438/