Battle Hems of the Republic

Does a great costume drama have to have great costumes? Do great costumes make a costume drama great? The answer to the first question is no, but it helps. The answer to the second is absolutely not: consider "Memoirs of a Geisha" (2005), an orgy of sumptuous silk wrapped around an anorectic drama, or this year's Oscar winner for best costumes, "Elizabeth: The Golden Age," which laid an overheated golden egg. The historical epics, swashbucklers and literary romances that fall under the costume-drama rubric favor kings, queens and aristocrats over the common man. Royalty may be rotten, but it always looks good.

The colors of Colonial New England, on ample display in HBO's seven-part miniseries "John Adams," tend toward drab browns and grays. Let's admit it: democracy was not stylish. This superficial but unavoidable fact may account for the underrepresentation of the American Revolution in Hollywoodmovies, which have always preferred the hoop skirts and mossclad plantations of the Civil War era to the humble garb of 1770s Boston and Philadelphia. But "John Adams," based on David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, proudly—and successfully, based on the four episodes available for review—rebels against the slick romantic conventions of the typical Hollywood costume drama.

How could you not, if you choose the squat, cranky, resolutely unglamorous Adams as your protagonist and put a bald, bewigged Paul Giamatti in the role? Dispensing with Adams's early years as the son of a farmer and illiterate mother, director Tom Hooper and writer Kirk Ellis begin their saga in 1770, at the time of the Boston Massacre. Adams, already wed to Abigail (Laura Linney) and the father of four children, is hired as a lawyer to defend the British troops who fired upon the rebellious Boston mob, an unpopular assignment but one that demonstrates his unwavering commitment to the rule of law—and shows off his strategic brilliance. This first episode won't get your blood racing. It's a bit pokey, and there's little to delight the eye in those plain New England chambers. Be patient: the pugnacious Adams, a fascinating mixture of humility and ambition, grows on you, and he is soon joined by an all-star team of supporting revolutionaries: Ben Franklin (Tom Wilkinson), Thomas Jefferson (Stephen Dillane) and the towering, soft-spoken Gen. George Washington (David Morse, with nose putty), a sight gag himself when standing next to the diminutive Adams.

Any lover of rough-and-tumble backroom politics will be swept up in the debates and horse-trading compromises as the representatives to the Continental Congress agonize whether to break from England. We have the delicious sensation of eavesdropping on the birth of a nation. Pennsylvania's John Dickinson (Zeljko Ivanek), fearing a bloodbath, urges compromise and conciliation while the wily, acerbic Franklin teaches the headstrong Adams the arts of political subterfuge and urges Jefferson to remove the whiff of the pulpit from a phrase in the Declaration of Independence. This is a show that loves the telling detail. There's a rare intimacy to the series' approach to epochal historic events. There's no Valley Forge, no Paul Revere ride, but we're thrust onto the storm-tossed Atlantic when a seasick Adams, accompanied by his 14-year-old son John Quincy, sails to France to make an alliance with Louis XVI. Favoring gritty authenticity over romantic gloss, Hooper ("Elizabeth I," "Longford") doesn't spare us the sight of a wounded naval officer undergoing an amputation by hacksaw, the queasy-making process by which Abigail and her children are inoculated against smallpox, or the nastiness of a crowd of Boston patriots tarring and feathering an English seaman.