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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
8
Mixed:
14
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Apr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
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.
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TV Guide MagazineApr 23, 2024
Season 1 Review:
[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]
ColliderApr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
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.
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The GuardianApr 12, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Douglas is wholly convincing as the experienced but idiosyncratic statesman and 18th-century celebrity. And he has his usual undeniable presence (so compelling but always with a hint of creepiness at the edges). But Franklin himself was wearying by this point in his illustrious career and it feels as though we are concentrating on the wrong part of his astonishing story.
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The TelegraphApr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
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.
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Apr 12, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Mr. Douglas delivers his dialogue in such a croaking, quavering manner that it seems that what is at work is more a lack of control than a strategy and is, as a result, a distraction. At the same time, distractions may be welcome, given how glacially "Franklin" moves along its less-than-revolutionary path.
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Apr 12, 2024
Season 1 Review:
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.
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Apr 12, 2024
Apr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
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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