‘Franklin’ Review: Michael Douglas Is a Flatulent Founding Father in Apple TV+’s Poorly Focused Drama

Daniel Fienberg
·7 min read
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When he arrived in France in 1776, Benjamin Franklin had a sort of global fame that’s hard to completely fathom, given a world of slow-traveling news in which “social media” took the form of arduously printed and even more arduously distributed pamphlets. He’d been a diplomat, journalist, publisher and prolific inventor, but he was more widely known for semi-apocryphal things like “inventing” electricity, as well as his mastery of glib wisdom we’d call “sound bites” today.

Franklin’s mission, undertaken with no official governmental mandate, was to enlist France’s support — money, supplies, ships and soldiers — in the burgeoning war for American independence. His celebrity, particularly its more frivolous aspects (matched with an international perception of frivolous “Americans”), was both a boon and a disservice to his cause. It’s as if we sent MrBeast to negotiate peace in the Middle East, if MrBeast suffered from gout and had also created the glass harmonica.

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The mission of Apple TV+’s eight-episode Franklin is to strip away the superficial 21st century understanding of the bifocal-loving Founding Father to expose both his very human frailties and the particular form of genius that made his French campaign a — spoiler warning — success.

Franklin rarely completely succeeds. Adapted for TV by Kirk Ellis and Howard Korder and directed by Tim Van Patten (Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos), Franklin pinpoints all sorts of compelling historical details, but struggles to create any sort of narrative flow for what turned out to be an eight-year task for Franklin.

Was Franklin largely a horny quip machine whose brilliance was in getting the French to act against their national self-interest, in a foreshadowing of the myopia that led to the French Revolution several years later? Perhaps. Almost certainly, actually. But if Franklin accomplishes anything, it’s stirring up interest in the Stacy Schiff book that served as its source material — A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America — because the series is awash in characters and incidents that are barely footnotes to the monotonous story in the foreground.

My most frequent reaction to Franklin was, “That seems like it would probably be fascinating in a different context.”

My second most frequent reaction to Franklin was, “Man, Apple TV+ loves getting Oscar-winning actors to play stringy-haired, flatulent eccentrics.”

Following in Gary Oldman’s Slow Horses footsteps — dollars to donuts, gout will become a Jackson Lamb plot point by season five — Michael Douglas plays Franklin as a figure who is simultaneously mythic and easily overlooked as a past-his-peak cartoon. He arrives in France with his grandson Temple (Noah Jupe) and no clear path to the support he requires. The early stages of the Revolution have been disastrous for the Americans, and while some of the French are captivated by the spirit of liberty and freedom embodied by the fledgling nation, nobody in a position of power can so much as acknowledge Franklin’s existence, much less negotiate with him.

While trying to engage in back-channel conversations with the Comte de Vergennes (Thibault de Montalembert), France’s foreign minister, Franklin parlays his connections to take up residence in the guest house of a businessman, Chaumont (Olivier Claveries). Chaumont has decided to gamble that the proceeds from future trade with America will outstrip the cost of providing long-term hospitality to a man with Franklin’s appetites. Vergennes and Chaumont are, incidentally, much more complicated figures in this particular exchange than Franklin seems to be, but most viewers won’t be able to tell them apart from a half-dozen other sour-faced Frenchies.

I completely get the writing challenges here. Paris is a long way from where the Revolutionary War is taking place and even by including Gilbert du Motier — “Marquis de Lafayette,” to Hamilton fans — as a featured character, Franklin can’t find much action in this shadow diplomacy. So the series’ emphasis is on other things.

There are a variety of conspiracies against Franklin, some involving his trusted friend and doctor Edward Bancroft (Daniel Mays) and some sullen British villains who are even less defined than the sour Frenchmen. Then there are Franklin’s various romantic and semi-romantic dalliances, including flirtations with Ludivine Sagnier’s Anne Brillon, very interesting as a historical figure if only half-interesting as a romantic foil, and Jeanne Balibar’s Madame Helvetius, very interesting as a historical figure and not the least bit interesting as a romantic foil.

And then you have teenage Temple, whose actual history is, once again, far more intriguing than the way it’s depicted. Here he matures from a boy to a man — Jupe is fully convincing in the first stage, less so with the passing of time — through a number of redundant secondary threads in which he seeks out alternative mentors and tries to get laid.

Other figures who Ellis and Korder correctly recognize are worthy of notice, but probably worthy of better notice, include Romain Braud as Chevalier d’Eon, a spy and very likely a trans trailblazer; and Assaad Bouab as Pierre Beaumarchais, who might have been Franklin’s polymath peer, except that he’s treated as borderline comic relief for a few episodes and then vanishes.

Eventually, other American dignitaries show up, and they help push the main story along. Eddie Marsan is a nicely bullheaded John Adams, though he seems to be doing a different accent in each of this three or four episodes, while Ed Stoppard makes for a sneering and preening John Jay. Of course, HBO’s John Adams found a way to make the distinctly unlikable Adams into a character worthy of a limited series and made Ben Franklin, very well-played by the late Tom Wilkinson, a more rounded figure in a supporting role than he is here as a lead.

Douglas is wry, and I didn’t mind his very contemporary affectations at all — both because I don’t have a clue how Franklin actually sounded and because part of the point of the “character” is that he was in many ways a modern figure. I was more distracted by how often the series substitutes glib aphorisms and generalities about chess for genuine thought or wisdom. I think this Ben Franklin is actually closer to the villain of the piece than the hero, and I only give a 10 percent chance that that was intentional. He’s supposed to be rascally and patriotic and quick on his inflamed feet; instead, he’s leering and superficial and petty and very rarely an active part of the series — almost impossible to respect in any capacity.

If Franklin isn’t steering the action and Temple is mostly busy trying to find somebody to have sex with (or marry) and the sour Frenchmen border on interchangeable, what is pushing the action forward here?

It’s a lot of sitting around different parlor rooms and entering parties with great pomp. Unlike several recent shows that avoided claustrophobia despite navigating contained spaces — HBO’s The Regime and A Gentleman in Moscow — Franklin rather quickly suffers from visual fatigue. It’s one blue/gray-filtered chateau after another, none boasting individual personalities and none really rewarding the all-too-familiar “Let’s shoot with natural light!” dinginess. Attempts to add action and take scenes outdoors look artificial and contrived, and no matter how hard Jay Wadley’s score pushes various thriller-adjacent aspects, none of that is ever convincing. Full credit, though, to the hair and makeup, both top-notch throughout.

The final episode, featuring Adams, Jay and the British delegation debating the Treaty of Paris, was my favorite of the series. It also requires several characters to directly explain the brilliance of Franklin’s maneuvering, reinforcing how unlikely it is that viewers will be able to make those judgments based on what’s come before here. Still, the episode is good and talky, and confirms that there’s a great play or two-hour movie to be made about this entire saga. Just not this eight-hour TV series.

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