The leading man is a short, bald, pot-bellied lawyer with a passion for reading Latin and a habit of making enemies. The leading lady quotes Shakespeare, dresses modestly and seldom looks like she's having fun.
The opening hour unfolds against a backdrop of mud, snow and the endless gray of a New England winter. And all seven hours are filled with talk in historically accurate English accents about big ideas from the 18th century like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
This is not exactly the stuff of which TV miniseries are usually made.
And yet, John Adams, a $100 million-plus production about the life and times of America's second president, is one of the most compelling miniseries of the decade. The HBO program, starring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney, has the dramatic sweep of such old-time TV epics as Winds of War, but it also hews absolutely to the Pulitzer Prize-winning work written by David McCullough about Adams and the first 50 years of American life.
Produced by Tom Hanks and directed by Emmy Award-winner Tom Hooper, John Adams proves that true-to-life American history can make for inspired prime-time entertainment. That daring proposition from TV's most acclaimed channel is all the more remarkable coming at a time when many school systems have abandoned teaching students about the national past for fear that it might be deemed boring.
"John Adams is about ideas and it's about one man's political education - and that's rare for television," says Paul Giamatti, who plays Adams. "The language alone was something that made it hard for me to believe that somebody was actually going to put this on television. To have people talking at this high level and with this amount of intelligence is just utterly unique for commercial TV."
Rarer yet is the commitment that Hanks and HBO made to a truthful rendering of the past - rather than one cut to fit the flashy fashion of prime-time entertainment, McCullough says.
"What Tom Hanks and the people at HBO did in making this miniseries is phenomenal," he says. "Aside from an enormous amount of money, what they invested in this project is a desire to do something right about the founding time of our country and the secular faith on which our whole way of life is based. And they accomplished that - they never compromised and they never cheapened the history."
Trusted Tom Hanks
Few have mastered the craft of making authentic history come alive for a mass audience like McCullough.
