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- Apple TV+
- Apr 11, 2024
- Apple TV+
- Apr 11, 2024
- Apple TV+
- Apr 11, 2024
- Apple TV+
- Apr 11, 2024
Season Episodes
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Top Cast
Metascore
Mixed or Average
Based on 22 Critic Reviews
57
36% Positive
8 Reviews
8 Reviews
64% Mixed
14 Reviews
14 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Mixed or Average
Based on 22 Critic Reviews
57
36% Positive
8 Reviews
8 Reviews
64% Mixed
14 Reviews
14 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Whether singling out characters like the gender-bending Chevalier d’Éon, taking us to the theater, regaling us with armonica and piano recitals, or indulging us in Temple’s first blushes of love (and lust), Franklin takes enough narrative detours to more robustly tell this quintessentially American tale.
[Michael Douglas is] an inspired choice to portray the legendary Founding father and stateman Benajamin Franklin in a lavish if leisurely eight-hour docudrama. [22 Apr - 12 May 2024, p.5]
Franklin is too composed and unruffled in its storytelling to be a gripping spy thriller, but it also juggles too many plotlines at once to be considered a straightforward biopic. Yet every scene where Douglas inhabits this seemingly larger-than-life person humanizes an American hero — and reasserts that this may have just been the role he was meant to play at this stage in his career.
Douglas combines twinkly-eyed insouciance with gravel-voiced gravitas to prove that Franklin was the real deal. So much so that you want to know rather more about him and rather less about the flotilla of characters that breeze in and out of a story that focuses entirely on Franklin’s eight-year stay in France.
Franklin’s legendary charm was indeed good for something, and it still is here. But even those attributes, and Douglas’ interpretation of them, don’t quite prove inventive enough to compensate for its shortcomings.
Across eight episodes stuffed full of dull monologues in a country 3,000 miles away from the action of the war, the philosopher’s quest feels both self-serving and arrogant. Douglas tries to infuse humor in the role, highlighting Franklin’s various ailments – including his bouts of gout, along with his terrible grasp of the French language. Still, these interjections fail to break through the monotony of the show.
Franklin rarely completely succeeds. Adapted for TV by Kirk Ellis and Howard Korder and directed by Tim Van Patten (Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos), Franklin pinpoints all sorts of compelling historical details, but struggles to create any sort of narrative flow for what turned out to be an eight-year task for Franklin.
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