Hollywood Needs a Hero
Modern screenwriting, especially in the American tradition, is built around the individual protagonist. We’re programmed to follow a single hero on a clear journey. They have a goal, they face obstacles, they have a singular antagonist, and they experience
a profound character arc. But the American Revolution wasn’t a solo project. It was a messy, argumentative, and deeply collaborative effort run by committees, congresses, and shifting alliances. The HBO series John Adams is lauded for its historical detail, yet its very format requires it to place Adams at the center of nearly every key event, sometimes exaggerating his centrality to make the narrative work. History is a team sport full of grinding logistical work and tedious debate; a three-act structure is a relay race run by one person. The two are fundamentally at odds. The real drama of the founding often happened in letters, pamphlets, and legislative chambers—arenas that are notoriously difficult to make visually compelling without heavy-handed invention.
The Search for a Simple Villain
A good story needs a good villain. For Founding Fathers biopics, the easy antagonist is King George III and his army of Redcoats. This works for a while, giving the heroes a clear external enemy to unite against. But the most historically significant conflicts of the era were often internal. The furious debates weren't just with the British, but between Federalists and Republicans, between large states and small states, and, most profoundly, between the nation's stated ideals of liberty and its brutal reality of slavery. These aren't simple good-versus-evil fights. They are complex, deeply philosophical, and often involve protagonists on both sides. When a film like The Patriot invents cartoonishly evil British officers to simplify the conflict, it sacrifices historical truth for a fleeting emotional payoff. More complex shows, like the recent Franklin, struggle with a different problem: the drama of diplomacy and negotiation, while historically crucial, can feel dramatically inert and boring to a modern audience.
Sanding Down the Contradictions
The biggest screenwriting challenge is what to do with the Founders' own flaws. These were brilliant, visionary men who were also products of their time, entangled in systems of profound inequality. Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote that "all men are created equal," enslaved hundreds of people. John Adams, a champion of law, could be a prickly elitist who was deeply suspicious of the public. Modern scripts struggle with this duality. To create a sympathetic protagonist, writers are often tempted to downplay these contradictions. Hamilton brilliantly uses a modern cast and musical style, but it also streamlines history, compressing timelines and creating encounters that never happened to serve its narrative. It largely sidelines the issue of slavery to maintain its hero’s forward momentum. This isn't necessarily malicious; it's the gravitational pull of storytelling. A character arc demands change and growth, but it has trouble with a character who holds two massive, contradictory ideas for his entire life without resolution.
The Inconvenient Truth of History
Ultimately, the problem is that history isn't written like a screenplay. Real life is messy, anticlimactic, and full of loose ends. The very best historical dramas, like John Adams, succeed by embracing the friction between character and historical record. The series works because it portrays Adams as cantankerous and “obnoxious and disliked,” a complex figure rather than a marble statue. It leans into the difficulties, showing the harsh realities of 18th-century life, from brutal sea travel to primitive medicine. But even it must make concessions for drama. The truth is, the story of a nation’s founding is too big, too contradictory, and involves too many key players to fit neatly into the narrative box Hollywood has built. The story is not about a single hero; it’s about a messy, flawed, and often deeply divided group of people who argued their way into creating a nation.
