Now, after reading multiple biographies of the founding fathers and previously becoming an expert on human behavior, I'm sad at the distortions of history, biography, and human behavior perpetrated by this mini-series. This mini-series portrays John Adams as a melancholic, principled, angry man, which is entirely wrong on melancholic and angry, and only partially right on his principles, as these were distorted. It failed to show John Adams as the devoted follower of Samuel Adams and committed to the same cause as Samuel Adams from where the mini-series begins and places John Adams at the edge of all the action, instead of among Samuel Adams' fomenting puppet masters, who never appeared at the riots. This highly fictionalized portrayal highly ignores history's record of who John Adams was and the very deep religiously pious nature of both Samuel Adams and John Adams; portraying Samuel Adams as ostentatious, nobly garbed and an accumulator of wealth, when the opposite was true. John Adams was much more likely to be decked out in fine clothes than Samuel Adams, who despised pretension and ostentatious spending. Moreover, John Adams had by the beginning of this mini-series already been among Samuel Adams' secretive inner circle. Samuel Adams was known to hold unprovoked violence toward persons as reprehensible and unacceptable to his God, thus in Samuel Adams' piety, it was likely Samuel Adams who asked John Adams (the only lawyer among them) to represent the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre. Moreover, the alternating angry and melancholy natures of this portrayal is not only historically in accurate, as John's actual character was more like an enthusiastic irrepressible happy little dog, rather than the universally unlikable character of this angry melancholic portrayal, which never gets a person chosen or elected for anything. From that huge error and others on this mini-series, it this portrayal is doomed to be a highly inaccurate, highly fictionalized portrayal of John Adams, which only historians will recognize, because of the broad ignorance of the masses.
Review of John Adams
