Rewatching ‘John Adams,’ That Time Paul Giamatti Played American History's Paul Hunham

HBO

It would be an easy take to write that John Adams was a trial run for HBO’s string of critically-acclaimed projects still to come. It feels like that as you watch it—it’s warty and imperfect, idiosyncratic, with sometimes shaky production values, but it ultimately rewards your patience in the end. Only the timeline doesn’t line up: John Adams was released in 2008, hot on the heels of HBO’s probably never-to-be-duplicated string of great shows, from Six Feet Under to The Sopranos to Rome to The Wire, whose season finale aired just a week before the first episode of John Adams debuted.

So then maybe it was a trial run for Paul Giamatti-as-a-leading-man? Nope, that doesn’t work either: He’d already long since graduated from secondary-schlub duty, like Pig Vomit in Private Parts (1997) to anti-hero status, getting nominated for a Supporting Actor Oscar for Cinderella Man (2006) and getting snubbed for at least two leading roles along the way, as Harvey Pekar in American Splendor (2003) and Miles in Sideways (2004).

Where The Wire feels timeless, John Adams feels… well, what’s the opposite of that? Timeful? Anachronistic, perhaps—right down to the now-defunct HBO Films logo that plays ahead of the titles (distinct from the snow sequence that opens more-rewatched shows like The Sopranos or Deadwood). John Adams is a miniseries that doesn’t feel like it would be released today, mostly because it didn’t feel like it should be released in 2008, either. Anyone besides HBO would’ve followed up a well-reviewed, underwatched show like The Wire with something that was an easier sell. A show about hot vampires, say (True Blood would come six months later). Instead they gave us seven nearly-feature-film length episodes about the least-remembered founding father, starring unconventional leading man Giamatti opposite Laura Linney, in a series doggedly determined to remind us how bad everyone’s teeth were in the 18th century.

Where the better-remembered presidents are easy to turn into avatars for historic struggles, which easily lend themselves to hero narratives—George Washington standing up to the British, Lincoln standing up to slave power, FDR standing up to robber barons, JFK standing up to the military-industrial complex, and so forth—John Adams is a tougher nut to crack. That he and his son John Quincy were the only two of the first twelve presidents who didn’t own any slaves (a period of 53 years) is one of those facts you’d think all schoolchildren would know. That they don’t seems a testament to Adams’ oft-mentioned personal prickliness. Or, maybe it has more to do with our American penchant for disliking the people who point out our most obvious faults (all the more so when we know they’re right). Who better to personify that duality than Paul Giamatti, the angry little curmudgeon we love to love? In John Adams, he’s sort of like American history’s version of Paul Hunham from The Holdovers—the ugly little guy who tries to get us to be better, at great personal cost.

Un-slick to a fault, John Adams bears the unmistakable whiff of those early 2000s British dramas that aired on PBS in the pre-Downton days before British TV discovered production values. That it was shot by then-vet of British TV Tom Hooper (who would go on to direct The King’s Speech and Cats) and co-stars Laura Linney—who started hosting the rebranded Masterpiece on PBS around the same time—only deepens the association.

Yet John Adams’ lack of an obvious “hook” and sales-pitchy themes of the kind we’ve come to expect from American TV is a big part of what makes John Adams great. It’s one of the few depictions of the American revolution that treats the founding fathers as people, whose particular hang-ups and fractious personalities informed the republic they were building. And even “the republic they were building” is gilding the lily a bit—a situation had come to a head and they were trying to deal with it. Even Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit play about the other forgotten founding father, gives its subject the hero treatment (there’s no specific evidence for this, but it’s fun to treat Hamilton as Miranda’s revisionist response to John Adams, which mostly depicted Alexander Hamilton, played in HBO’s version by Rufus Sewell, as a proto-imperialist schemer).

Maybe John Adams needed a British director, who might have treated America’s independence as anything but “destiny”—a foregone conclusion, the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, etc.—as so many American storytellers tend to do. The show’s longest episode is its second, clocking in at a full 92 minutes, covering the Second Continental Congress and the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. It is long, drab, and shot mostly indoors, but it conveys the history without polishing it into a postcard. All these sweaty, verbose, be-wigged fancy men (with terrible teeth) had a real dilemma on their hands: whether to pick a fight, try to compromise, or beg for mercy, with their own gruesome executions as the stakes for a wrong choice. Anyone who has ever had a bone to pick with a boss can relate, in our own cowardly-by-comparison ways.

Throughout, it’s the memorable characterizations that make John Adams sing, from pragmatic Abby Adams (Linney, in her best role) to Danny Huston—who’s theatrical to the point that he can basically only play larger-than-life characters, but excels at them—as Adams’ blowhard cousin, Samuel. We get Clancy O’Connor as South Carolina’s lisping, loyalist-leaning fop, Edward Rutledge; Tom Wilkinson giving the definitive portrayal of Adams’ wiser, more tactful better angel, Ben Franklin; Stephen Dillane, a few years away from playing Stannis Baratheon on Game of Thrones, as the taciturn romantic Thomas Jefferson; Justin Theroux as cocksure rich guy John Hancock; and David Morse as the quiet mensch who effortlessly commands respect, George Washington. Once you’ve seen John Adams, it’s basically impossible to imagine Ben Franklin without picturing Wilkinson or Thomas Jefferson without picturing Dillane. Performances that embed themselves in your brain like these are the ultimate mark of quality.

Throughout the show, two themes shine through: the costs of doing the right thing, and the way people who love and respect each other can still disagree (or is it the other way—that people who disagree can still love each other.) Is Adams a disagreeable prick because he’s so often right, or so often right because doing the right thing so often requires a disagreeable prick? His stubborn, unbending nature makes him just the guy America needs to keep them out of a disastrous war with Napoleon’s France, but also kind of a nightmare to his children and in-laws, who he refuses to do any favors for, being both the beau ideal of a New England Puritan and the personification of why other people dislike New England Puritans. He’s voluble, constantly going overboard in fits of passion, and transparently falsely modest, with all his worst qualities leavened by the fact that he’s as acutely aware of them as his worst detractors, and visibly pained by it—a mix of qualities maybe only Paul Giamatti could play.

As good as Giamatti and Linney are together, it’s Adams’ relationship with Dillane’s Jefferson that’s arguably the great takeaway of the series. The voluble, stubbornly moral New Englander and the quiet, louche Virginia snob make perfect foils. They write the Declaration of Independence together, become political opponents for decades, and finally become treasured pen pals late in life, until they die on the same day, at age 90 and 83, respectively. And on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, no less. Adams’ famous last words? “Jefferson survives.” (Add however much irony you want to the fact that Jefferson had died hours earlier and Adams hadn’t heard yet).

Even those of us who never considered ourselves particularly patriotic nor consider the constitution a sacred document can be hopeless suckers for that story, about a friendship that transcended ideology and defined the USA, a country in which friends are allowed to disagree about political principles, or so we like to think of it.

It’s easy to read the John Adams-Thomas Jefferson relationship as a kind of wish fulfillment, an epic frenemyship as a balm to a polarized populace—arguably as riven in 2008 as it is today (though maybe more ready then to reconcile). Yet I read the Adams-Jefferson detente more as aspirational than glib—a living myth, just as the constitution was intended as a living document, meant to show what’s possible, rather than a prescriptive one meant to dictate. The founding fathers did something great not because they received some divine bolt of inspiration from God or were particularly moral people, but because they were willing to work at it.

Originally Appeared on GQ