Paul Giamatti was appropriately uncomfortable and flop sweat-drenched as Adams, Laura Linney did not sugar-coat Abigail as much as I expected, and relative unknown Stephen Dillane made one of the better on-screen Jeffersons I have seen, hanging back in the debates, lounging when he sat, fiercely intellectualizing every remark, and brightening up when complimented on one of his gadgets. At any rate, Dillane is an improvement over Nick Nolte and the White Shadow. The great Tom Wilkinson does perfectly well as Franklin, conveying the slipperiness and calculation beneath the raconteur. Unfortunately, writer Tom Hooper has loaded the script with predictable Franklin bromides that not even Wilkinson can say aloud in a natural, non-ridiculous way. You could see “we will all hang separately” coming several minutes ahead of time. David Morse’s prosthetic nose plays George Washington, and shows more animation than the actor.

Intermittently, the second episode effectively deploys HBO Films’ trademark gritty physical realism, best seen here in a grisly smallpox inoculation sequence where we are shown the Adams’s doctor drawing matter from a dying boy’s sores and cutting it into the skin of Abigail and the children. On the other hand, the episode as a whole does not approach the sense of full immersion in a past society provided by other HBO costumers like Deadwood and Rome. No one in John Adams seems to drink heavily or swear. No one seems to have servants or slaves, though modern-pious and sometimes unlikely verbal references to the slavery issue are plentiful. The streets of Philadelphia seem to have been evacuated so the Continental Congress could meet in peace, which was very much not the case.

Geography is a big problem for the series as it always is on TV. In the HBO universe, the Adamses seem to have lived somewhere around East Cambridge, rather than Braintree on the South Shore. They can go up on a hill behind the house and see the Battle of Bunker Hill. The road from Ft. Ticonderoga to Boston runs right by their front door! Very convenient. I am including a map so the less Boston-centric can see the problem. Braintree would be off the bottom of this map.

Like the David McCullough source material, this episode was atrocious when dealing with politics or political thought. Tom Paine and Common Sense are not even mentioned, nor is there any sense of the pressure the delegates were feeling from the political radicalism that was boiling over in the streets of Philadelphia during the summer of 1776, a source of great consternation to the real Adams. (Ordinary Americans appear only in occasional scenes of silent soldiers and disease victims, and in a nice polite crowd that hears the Declaration read at the end.) Here the speech Adams gives in reply to John Dickinson during the final independence debate comes out of nowhere and sounds more like Paine than Adams, proposing a national republic and extolling revolution in a way that would have had the most of the delegates fleeing back home or to the British if anyone one had actually said that kind of stuff on the floor of the Continental Congress. The real speech, while not recorded, seems to have been much more practical and nothing the delegates had not heard many times before.

Having done without it since The Sopranos and Deadwood ended, I forgot to turn HBO back on in time to catch the premier of the cable channel’s take on John Adams, based on David McCullough’s much-maligned-by-me biography. The McCullough version seemed potentially more suited to filming than to a serious print biography, so my mind is open. I plan to catch up with the series soon, but if any readers did see it, please share. The New York Times reviewer was not impressed, but it does sound like there was a realistic tarring-and-feathering scene that bids fair to become a staple of my survey class.