The Wire and John Adams on HBO

My wife and I watched The Wire's fifth and final season on HBO this year, our first experience with the show. How had a show of such excellence passed me by? I had heard it referenced occasionally over the past few years, and what I heard was good, but I really had no idea. The Wire should have been lauded in the same terms as The Sopranos. Check that. It should have received even higher plaudits because it's better than The Sopranos. We have begun watching season one on DVD and it started as superbly as it ended. Previously I was of the opinion that the finest television I had ever watched was the first season of The Sopranos, the first season of Rome, and the entirety of Band of Brothers. Now I have to add The Wire to the list - maybe at the top. It is simply brilliant.

Notice a common denominator among those shows? Yes, they were all produced by HBO. Why can't anyone else do television this good, or even close to it? HBO continues to prove its superiority to the other networks with the current mini-series John Adams, based on David McCullough's book. We've watched the first two episodes and it's terrific. When I first heard that Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney were playing John and Abigail I was unimpressed - neither seemed to fit, especially Giamatti. But they are both excellent. If I went looking for faults I might say that Giamatti's Adams, while brilliant in other ways, is perhaps too smoothed-over - the Adams I know from history is all jagged edges - but this is probably due to McCullough's source portrayal of Adams. David McCullough is a fine historian (I loved his book about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge) but if he has a failing it's that he falls in love with his subjects - he did it with Harry Truman also (it was still a terrific book.) So while we get small doses of Adams' vanity and insecurities, which were profound, they are portrayed here as endearing quirks rather than driving forces of his personality. I'll need to read the book before I lay the entire blame for this at the feet of the series' writers or Giamatti but even so it's a minor quibble. The program concentrates on the events of the early founding and the role Adams played in them and here I have nothing but praise. It doesn't contain everything but what it does contain it gets right - the major events, the turning points in popular opinion, both sides of the debate at the Second Continental Congress, the political machinations before the vote for separation. The program gives you a full sense of the risks these men were taking. We forget how dangerous the moment was for those voting for war. They knew they would hang if their cause did not succeed. The period in question, from about 1770 until the early nineteenth century, was full of drama. So far, John Adams takes full advantage of the era's raw material. If you are interested at all in the founding moment - to me there is no more interesting period in American history - then John Adams will dazzle you.