Franklin (2024)

Even though it has some issues, Franklin is an addictive look at one of the most fascinating people in American history, led by a scintillating performance from a first rate actor.

It’s all those layers of personality, and Michael Douglas’ uncanny ability to make those facets come to life, that save the day in “Franklin.”

What Van Patten and his crew accomplish is the feeling of a new nation being forged in the waning embers of an old empire and the cautious optimism all parties feel toward that potential.

[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]

While some of the French figures on the show blur together, and while the eight episodes do at times feel longer than is necessary for this particular story, Douglas keeps it all quite watchable.

Very enjoyable if not always convincing.

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.

We’re recommending Franklin because we were pleasantly surprised with how well Michael Douglas slipped into the role of Benjamin Franklin. But the rest of the show left us mostly bored.

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.

A pleasurable but never-compelling-enough study of the events underpinning the birth of a nation, Franklin is all about Michael Douglas playing the polymath politico with equal parts intelligence and twinkle.

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.

“Nicolas Le Floch” understood how airless a narrative becomes if it only focuses on the upper crust. But as the story of the powerful and their backroom negotiations, by design that’s all “Franklin” can be.

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.

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.

It feels like the one thing a big-budget historical TV series should not: homework.

It feels like the one thing a big-budget historical TV series should not: homework.

“Franklin” comes across as an apathetic history lesson, too content in its embodiment of French decorum to be bothered explaining why audiences of any country should care.

Despite its extraordinary lack of narrative drive, Franklin has clearly had plenty of effort poured into it; that’s what makes its limpness such a shame.

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.

Despite the lush trappings and the vain efforts of Michael Douglass to put a contemporary spin on the story of Founding Father Ben Franklin in Paris, this lifeless historical series is padded beyond forgiveness, succeeding only in lulling us all to sleep.