| | I suspect one of the reasons McCullough was happy with the mini-series (or said he was) is that it boosted the sales of his book (which is excellent history and biography). The mini-series provoked me to reread the biography which I did several years ago and forgot most of the details.
I did not find the series misrepresenting Adam's attitude toward France and the French minor. The way the mini-series presented the thing, it made Adams look like a New England Puritan who found himself trapped in a French whore-house. In reality, Adams came to appreciate many of the fine things that were in France, not the least of which were first rate building and art works. Adams came to admire the paints of Ruebens while in France, for example. The mini-series made Adams look anti-French which he really was not. I thought the mini-series did a better job with Jefferson, than with Adams. Jefferson had some real twists and knots in his thinking. He was, what Aristotle called acratic. Both the biography and the mini-series brought this out reasonably well.
Television is an inherently visual medium so it will always be biased toward pictorial travelogues, panoramas and special effects. The Adams miniseries was an extended visit to Williamsburg which an included Boston-land, New York-land, Paris-land and Philadelphia-land. There is no way of getting rid of this tendency, so one should sit back and enjoy it, I suppose.
I found the discrepancies between LOTR the novel and LOTR the movie annoying for the same reason. The rearranged the material, the omitted important stuff and the put things out of order thus missing the point of the author. I think J.R.R Tolkien might have with held his blessing from the motion picture trilogy.
Bob Kolker
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