“The West Wing with Wigs” ? Politics and History in HBO’s John Adams

• Main Author: Aurélie Godet
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Groupe de Recherche Identités et Cultures 2012-05-01
• Series: TV Series
• Subjects: John Adams; history; miniseries
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/tvseries/1077

In 2008, HBO released a $ 100 million, seven-part mini-series based on David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Adams. The reviews were enthusiastic, with most people praising the cinematography, the storytelling, and Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney’s acting. Soon, however, historians started to complain about various historical inaccuracies in the show. Jeremy Stern, for example, wrote on the History News Network that “the first episode especially is fundamentally marred by an all-too-familiar and depressingly resilient prejudice against the early Revolutionaries, one that stretches back to late nineteenth-century scholarship and its depiction of the early protests as disingenuous tax riots.” John Bell went on to spot fibs, half-truths, and outright fabrications in HBO’s series on his website Boston1775.blogspot.com. Writer Kirk Ellis responded to these criticisms by saying that his intent was “not to portray the ‘external facts’ of the American Revolution […]. Rather, it was to depict an internal history, an epic of thoughts and ideas refracted through the singular prism of one man who helped shape those events”. Arising from Ellis’s declaration, this paper aims to explore the conflicting relationship between the “historian’s truth” and the “dramatist’s truth” in John Adams. Three sets of questions, in particular, will be asked :1) How does the series picture the stormy birth of the young republic and how does it bring John Adams to life ? 2) Did the second president of the United States “deserve” such a tribute ? In other words, what new aspects of John Adams’s life are revealed here that are not taught in high school or university history classes ?3) How and when does the writer’s “poetic license” manifest itself ? Is it acceptable to revise history in order to personify the spirit of the people and the politics of the times more fully ? In other words, does an understanding of history necessarily come at the expense of historical accuracy ?