John Adams

John Adams. Here is a new mini-series from HBO. Good. Produced by Tom Hanks? You've got me. I'm not a huge fan of Paul Giamatti, but maybe he'll surprise me. I'm interested in American history in general, and this series seems to have a cast of good actors.

We open on the night of the Boston Massacre. Giamatti is his normal overacting-in-strange-times self, making it difficult to tell what Adams is supposed to be feeling. A very poor job is done of conveying the horror of the massacre, or the effect it had on the locals. Another problem is that the British soldiers are so horribly weird looking, it really distracts. It honestly looks like they walked around the streets for a couple of hours, and grabbed the strangest people they could find. Then chose the worst actor among them to be the commander.

Then they completely skip the Boston Tea Party! This could have been the most fun scene to watch in the entire series. Give a good director that scene to work with, the budget of HBO and a little artistic license, what could they come up with? Oh, a mention that the tea party happened. Awesome.

The Continental congress is more boring to watch than C-SPAN, and Margo almost choked on her beverage the first time we saw the fake nose on the George Washington(David Morse).
Laura Linney brings very little to the table, and there has to be a better way to handle the wig issue. Two episodes were more than enough, I am miles from impressed. At least it shows that HBO can still make mistakes. If I manage to struggle through any more episodes when they come out I'll try to write another update, but so far, I would recommend that you stay away.