HBO's 'John Adams' slogs through history

Like a declaration of war against any contenders at this year's Emmys, HBO's "John Adams" arrives Sunday, with a cast far beyond the standards of mere mortal television -- Paul Giamatti! Laura Linney! Tom Wilkinson! -- and production values of Spielbergian proportions. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by David McCullough, it follows, in seven episodes, the adult life of the man often considered the most influential and, ironically, least well-known of our country's founders. It is gorgeous, precise and at times poetic.

If only it were more interesting.

I feel like a heretic writing those words, but there they are and I won't take them back. Historical drama, if it is any good, always serves two masters -- story and period detail. In that order. Unfortunately, so smitten are the creators of "John Adams" with historical earnestness and pedigree they seem to have forgotten how to tell a good story. Which is pretty astonishing considering what a great story it is to tell. Love, war, sex, politics, danger, betrayal, depraved foreign courts, postal issues -- the life of John Adams has it all, and a short, bristling, ill-tempered but still brilliant and yes, sexy, protagonist to boot. A Colonial "House" without the Vicodin addiction.

Yet writer Kirk Ellis and director Tom Hooper seem determined, especially in early episodes, to make it not so. Zealously illuminating the often ghastly nature of the times and "real" temperaments of these famous men and women -- arrogant, exhausted, plagued by fears and insecurities, often physically beset -- they get mired in historic detail and hobble their characters, who become as one-dimensional in their failings as they are so often portrayed in their patriotism.

Yes, it's interesting, if a bit gruesome, to see early smallpox vaccinations, but not if the price is rendering Abigail Adams mopey and Thomas Jefferson tedious. Which takes some doing.

Things improve in Episodes 3 and 4, but from the moment it opens, "John Adams" is passionate only in its determination to deglamorize the American Revolution. We meet our main character as he defends the British troops involved in the famous Boston Massacre, successfully arguing that they were hectored into firing by a group of miscreants intent on setting off a bloody incident. Giamatti's Adams is not likable, nor is he meant to be. Grouchy and vain, principled yet sanctimonious, he abhors the way King George III treats the Colonies, but he will not stoop to acts of violence to protest it (a horrifying sequence involved a man being tarred and feathered bolsters his point quite effectively). It is difficult to figure out what, exactly, John Adams wants, except constant reassurance that he is smarter than the average guy. Certainly it isn't his wife, Abigail (Linney), whose main job seems to be to tease her husband into a better humor by reminding him that his intelligence is so superior he need not be constantly reminding people of it.