Franklin

For all the promising fertile ground on which Franklin is sown, the overwhelming takeaway from the Apple TV+ eight-part miniseries is confirmation of a historical certainty – Michael Douglas is a magnetic leading man. The 70-year-old founding father is a role into which Douglas throws himself with relish and vivacity, providing a central spark to a drama whose inert pace often strangely plunges it into the realm of comfort viewing. 

This iteration of Benjamin Franklin finds him arriving on the shores of Western Europe with his 17-year-old grandson (Noah Jupe), hoping to covertly enlist military and financial support from the French monarchy to bolster the American Republican war effort, just as it approaches the brink of collapse. At a glance, it’s an interesting kaleidoscopic collision of ideas and political philosophies; a strange and unlikely alliance between one of the most absolutist monarchies in history and an antithetical experiment in democracy on the other side of the Atlantic, underpinned by a common enemy in the British. The geo-political also has a more personal, intimate mirror in the form of Franklin’s son, currently serving a treason sentence for loyalty to the British.

Despite these promising dramatic conflicts, forays into intriguing political manoeuvrings and some prickly dialogue to match Douglas’s enthusiasm, the show’s edges are somewhat blunted by teasing romantic subplots, a frustratingly on-the-nose, recurring chess analogy and a general air of pedestrianism. It does, at least, look set to disenfranchise French audiences a little less than Ridley Scott’s damply received Napoleon, due in no small part to the revolutionary act of hiring an impressive set of French actors to play French characters, and trusting its audience not to switch off at the first sight of subtitled dialogue. Who would have thought?

Matthew McMillan

Franklin is released on Apple TV+ on 19^th April 2024.

Watch the trailer for Franklin here: