Sunday, March 16, 2008

Meh.

Sweetie and I splurge each month for a subscription to HBO and it has brought us untold riches - Rome, Big Love, and a host of other fabulous programming (but not, Tell Me You Love Me, which to me seemed like Thirtysomething with uninteresting sex). So, we were pretty interested in the latest offering of John Adams, based upon the tome by David McCullough. We were immediately intrigued with the casting of Laura Linney and Paul Giammati.

(In the interest of total impartiality, I should dicslose that I bought the book and read about 1/3 before I got hopelessly bored. Let's face it - Ben Franklin was much more interesting. Sweetie did read the whole thing, in fits and starts.)

It got off to a pretty slow start and my interest waned pretty quickly. It took a real nose dive once I realized that without his wig thing-y, he bears an unbelievable resemblance to Uncle Fester from the Addams Family:



I shared my observation with Sweetie, who immediately agreed and we spent the rest of the two episodes imaging light bulbs coming out of John Adams/Paul Giamatti's mouth whenever he was wigless. It was distracting, to say the least.

All in all, I thought the first two episodes were meh. I am also slightly concerned that my reaction is due to some issue with ADD where my attention can only be captured by programming that is lurid and involves lots of gratuitous sex, neither of which feature in this miniseries.

Or maybe, it really was just meh and TV Guide, the New Yorker, Newsweek and The Washington Post were all smoking crack.

1 comment:

Shinejil said...

Yeah, there's not much in Adams' life that could be called gratuitous, especially not the sex. I don't have a television, but it somehow gives me hope for our society that at least a show about John Adams was made, even if it dragged and had strange, disturbing pop culture resonances with the other renowned Addamses...

Now Franklin, there's a racy movie. Or Jefferson.