Digging Up the Past

With Lauren Ambrose and the funereal Six Feet Under off HBO, the network looks to draw viewers by resurrecting a historical figure.

NEW TV SHOW: John Adams, HBO

SOUNDS KIND OF LIKE: That dead president guy from history class.

BUT IT'S DIFFERENT BECAUSE: Adams, as seen in this miniseries based on the compelling and Pulitzer Prize-winning Adams biography by David McCullough, is actually more than a white-wigged answer to a multiple-choice question. (By the way, the answer is C. The second U.S. president.) In this seven-episode miniseries, Adams is shown as being a respected Massachusetts attorney by day and a hard-driving revolutionary and passionately romantic married man by night.

PEOPLE YOU'LL RECOGNIZE: Paul Giamatti is convincing as Adams. (It turns out that our second president also hated Merlot. Who knew?) Laura Linney is Abigail Adams. Adams's longtime rival Thomas Jefferson is played with surprising sneer by Stephen Dillane (who was Leonard Woolf in The Hours). St. Elsewhere's Dr. Jack Morrison, David Morse, is George Washington. And Justin Theroux - who had a brief but memorable run as Joe on Six Feet Under and who as a Washington, D.C., native may have this presidential-history stuff in his blood - plays John Hancock.