A French lad (Andrew Stevens, son of Stella) discovers he's the son of an English lord born on the wrong side of the blanket. When his English family tries to kill him he flees to America (no United States as of yet) and becomes involved in Revolution.
John Jakes' Revolutionary series of books were the Harry Potter of their day. They were must-read. Naturally, they were snapped up for a miniseries (the wonder is, they were left on the shelf so long and not dramatized in time for the Bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence).
The cast is a cross section of 1970s TV stars. It may seem weird these days to see Tom Bosley as Benjamin Franklin or William Shatner as Paul Revere (whose ride was not a failure, btw--he accomplished what he was sent to do). But when America had three commercial networks TV stars were important and everyone in America knew who they were. Casting well-known faces were useful shorthand.
Rising stars (Kim Cattrell, Stevens, etc.) Joined old hands like James Gregory and Harry Morgan.
These adaptations of Jakes' novels are sometimes stiff and ring in historical figures at odd moments, hence the title of this review. That's a fault of Jakes, a hack writer who cut his teeth on unremarkable sci-fi, who was not bad but hardly great. The standard TV writers were worse. And, of course, real people did talk more formally back then.
The then-famous faces handle the dialogue with various degrees of facility. Buddy Ebsen (then playing "Barnaby Jones") and Noah Beery (then the dad on 'The Rockford Files") are swamped. William Daniels, who played John Adams on the stage and then the movie of "1776" (a musical using lots of dialogue taken from letters and diaries of the time) sounds totally natural as Sam Adams.
While it's not as slick as today's TV productions (how could it be?) It's a good story. If it seems hackneyed it's because we've seen it all since. But there was nothing like it on TV before.
In a day when ignorance of what American freedom is about is so high, I'd suggest this as a nice crash course in why the United States is here and what it's all about. It's a lot more entertaining than the ancient Encyclopaedia Brittanica films they fed us in grade school in the 1960s and 1970s.
It may be soap operaish, but it's hard to resist the soaps. What, after all, is "Game of Theones" but a soaper set in another world with more blood?
