Episode 5: John Adams, Vice President
Episode 6: John Adams, President
Episode 7: John Quincy Adams, Diplomat
This review of the middle chapters of The Adams Chronicles will be shorter than the last one, and there’s a reason for that: this series gets more boring the farther you get into it.
They tried. And you know, some of it works. I liked George Grizzard more with each episode, and I think he ended up being more convincing as grumpy-old-man Adams than he was as charismatic, brilliant firebrand Adams. The writers effectively avoided picking sides with Adams’ presidency; they don’t ignore his mistakes but don’t turn his administration into a straight-up disaster, either. Even when you love the guy it’s difficult to overlook the fact that he was a genuinely terrible politician who created a lot of problems for himself.
Jeremiah Sullivan is HILARIOUS, perhaps unintentionally, as Alexander Hamilton. He’s continually blocked and lit like a horror movie villain, there’s practically dramatic organ music each time he enters. Literally every single scene where John Adams insists to somebody that Hamilton is not a threat and that he, Adams, is his own man, it’s followed by one where some cabinet member or senator has a drink with Hamilton and they both plot to spy on or undermine Adams. It’s great.
David Birney in his single starring episode as John Quincy Adams is also very good, though sadly his chapter is the weakest so far. He effectively plays a man whose intellectual gifts were seemingly without limit, but who could never manage to translate that intelligence into social skills. We see a lot less of his marriage than we did of his parents’ but we can easily tell what a comparative disaster it was, not lacking in love but lacking in much that would have made either person happy.
What doesn’t work is…the story itself and everything else. John Quincy Adams was a great man, who has rarely gotten his due from historians, but he was not a cinematic hero, and there’s simply no way to make the signing of the Treaty of Ghent exciting. Or, there might be, I’m not sure. They didn’t find it here.
The problem, I think, is that the parts of his life which are cinematic partly coincide with his father’s, and the series is structured so that only one of them will star at a time. I would have loved to see an episode about fourteen-year-old JQA going alone to Russia on his first diplomatic job. However, we were following his mother and father in Britain. While we were sitting with JQA in interminable treaty negotiations, his father was patching up his friendship with Thomas Jefferson and producing one of the most important body of American letters. It’s a symptom of the fact that this series wasn’t written like a series, but like a documentary with actors. Somebody decided that we’d follow the public life of the Adams family in chronological order, so that’s what we get.
It’s too bad. Again, the parts that work do work, and it’s probably my favorite part of American history. There was the sense, and you can tell that the people at the time knew it too, that anything could have happened and no tradition or institution was safe. Everybody was making it up as they went along; it was never taken for granted that any of this would work. Many at the time found Adams’ inauguration more moving than Washington’s, as it proved that a peaceful, cordial transfer of power between two unrelated heads of state was possible.
There’s a way to make this exciting, and they do their best, but there’s precious little sense of momentum or urgency in the narrative, and what there is drops away entirely by part seven. Part seven is just boring.
Recommend?
Not really. If you have the whole series, go ahead and finish it. If you’re a history nerd there’s some interest, and the performances are mostly very good even when the wigs are generally not. Also, Christopher Lloyd plays the Czar of Russia. That's right.