"One of the reasons I began my book as I did - with Adams heading off to Philadelphia in the dead of winter on horseback for nearly 400 miles - was to show what he was made of. No softie does that."
There are several other moments during the miniseries when sticking to accurate depictions of the brutish reality of Colonial life makes for stunningly vivid drama.
One involves a graphic rendering of the horrific pain and degradation inflicted on a victim who was tarred and feathered and carried on a rail.
The second comes when Abigail Adams, at home alone with three children as her husband serves as one of the new nation's first ambassadors to France, decides to have her family inoculated against small pox - a gory and highly unpredictable process at the time.
A warning: Watching the wounds on a smallpox victim being lanced so that the fluid from within can be placed into cuts made into the arms of Abigail and her children may be too intense for the tastes of some viewers. On the other hand, no better testimony could be given to the courage and strength of this extraordinary woman.
"In her supposedly simpler time, Abigail had to keep the farm going, find hired help, cope with inflation and shortages of all kind, all on her own while John was away for months, eventually years, at a stretch," McCullough says."The shadow of death loomed everywhere. Epidemic disease, dysentery and smallpox could and did sweep in any time, taking hundreds of lives. Nobody knew where these horrors came from or how to stop them or when they would be over."
`A great love story'
In the miniseries that will anchor the next six Sunday nights for HBO, the pain and darkness of such moments are redeemed by an inspirational core narrative celebrating the love of Abigail and John Adams and the triumph of the big ideas that came to define our national identity. McCullough's primary source: the thousands of letters between John and Abigail.
"It is a great love story," McCullough says, "It's a cliffhanger of a story about a man and a woman caught up in one of the most dangerous, tumultuous periods in the whole larger story of our country. Together they were at the heart of what was then called the `Glorious Cause of America.' They saw themselves as taking part in one of the surpassing dramas in history - which indeed it was."
For his part, Giamatti says he's just happy that the producers and writers "allowed these two characters to be as intelligent as they were."
Such a commitment to intellect, after all, is not exactly what prime-time TV is known for in this era of reality TV.
"The one thing I kept praying after I took the job is that I hope to God they don't chicken out and start rewriting it and trying to dumb it down," Giamatti says. "Aside from the character, aside from the story, aside from everything, it was just the intelligence of this miniseries that I found so exciting."
david.zurawik@baltsun.com
