osprey_archer | John Adams

I kind of think that the brainstorming process for HBO’s miniseries John Adams went like this:

Producer: HBO writers! We are writing a show set in History. Tell me, what was History like?

HBO Writer #1: Boring!

HBO Writer #2: Dirty!

HBO Writer #3: Full of showy and distracting camera angles!

Producer: Not sure where that idea came from, #3, but nonetheless I like it almost as much as the first two!

Admittedly, if John Adams were not quite so boring, I probably wouldn’t have time to get distracted by the camera angles. But as it is, I had a lot of time to think, “Why is the camera on a diagonal? Why did we suddenly go into shaky-cam? Why does John Adams have such large nostrils?”

I don’t think they were going for boring. At least, I presume they weren’t going for boring, because who tries to make a boring TV show? I think they were going for stately, and somehow that translated into having lots of shots last just a little longer than they need to, which cumulatively makes the thing glacially slow. In particular, there are lots of long reaction shots where characters stare poker-faced into space. What are they feeling? Do they have feelings? Who knows?

As you can imagine, this makes it hard to feel invested in the characters. Indeed, the writers seem to have made a concerted effort to make it hard to care, because they don’t both introducing many of the characters and so we are just left watching rooms full of interchangeable men in wigs.

I couldn’t even root for John and Abigail Adams! And I love John and Abigail Adams! But there’s nothing there to hold on to.

I’ve seen movies where the characters never spell out their feelings, where even their facial expressions and body language are ambiguous, and yet there’s still a palpable sense of the characters' interiority, and of the relationships between characters. Cairo Time comes immediately to mind.

When it’s done well, it makes the characters interesting and slightly mysterious: you have to suss out their motivations and its never quite clear if you’re right - just like with real people. But somehow all John Adams managed is to make everyone seem flat.