HBO as underdog

Revolution is a frightening, heady and often fatal business, but it's what happens afterward that matters most. No one knows this better than the folks at HBO. "John Adams," which comes to a close Sunday night, has devoted seven beautifully shot hours to defying the often overly patriotic legends of our past with a toothache-and-all portrait of a man who helped define modern democracy, albeit grumbling every step of the way.

In his portrayal of our second president, Paul Giamatti creates a man perpetually dissatisfied, disgusted by the preening ambition of politics even as he is infected by it. If his relentless crankiness was a bit hard for some of us to take in early episodes, in the second half of the series it makes much more sense. While exhorting angry men to throw off the shackles of tyranny offers many opportunities for rhetorical fabulousness, setting up a new government is a bureaucratic nightmare, with oversized personalities disagreeing over things both petty and fundamental. George Washington (David Morse) so quickly tired of the infighting among his Cabinet and vagaries of public opinion that he stepped down from the presidency after a single term. "I know now what it is like to be disliked," he says to Adams, his perpetually disliked vice president.

It was a line that may well have resonated bitterly over at HBO, where a steady drumbeat of finales, bombs, scandal and management restructuring has turned the once-mighty cable network into an object of speculation and derision. For the last couple of years, calling the time of death (Was it the cancellation of "Deadwood"? Passing on "Mad Men"? Green-lighting "John From Cincinnati"?) has been a TV industry pastime, with representatives of hot-hot Showtime and even TNT doing their best to quash the desire to do a victory dance, at least in public.

But as the honorable Mr. Adams could have told them, it's all about the long haul. Just because you start a revolution, don't expect the teeming masses to like you every day for the rest of your life. For one thing, the successful revolutionary inevitably changes from underdog to Big Dog, and you know how mercurial Americans are about Big Dogs. So, sure, we rooted for HBO when it challenged the stodgy networks, giving us uncut versions of R-rated movies and original programming that blew open the boundaries of sex and politics, language and violence. But that was a while ago, and for years, HBO was the New York Yankees of television -- yeah, they're really good, but don't we all love it when the Yankees go into a slump?