john adams: perhaps better with sam adams?

Although my spring break won't start for a few weeks yet, I found myself gifted with a four-day Easter weekend which I somehow managed to squander away in the least productive manner possible.  Which is fine.  I should do better to remind myself that every free day need not be spent organizing my closets.  However, after making the conscious decision to spend my free Monday in a manner that doesn't involve grading, cleaning, straightening or organizing a single solitary thing, I needed some activity to divert my mind away from the guilt I knew I would ultimately start feeling over not spending this time grading, cleaning, straightening, or organizing a single solitary thing.  And since watching television is usually the best way to stifle thought (which can be a pesky, pesky beast from time to time) that's how I decided to spend the day - hanging out with my television.

But then comes the issue of what to watch on a Monday morning.  Since my dad had raved about HBO's John Adams mini-series over Easter dinner, I figured I'd take his usually sound advice and catch the first two episodes on On Demand.  And since I found myself incapable of not starting a load of laundry about 45 minutes in, I guess it was with this decision where my dream of doing nothing failed.

I know most of my readers have been watching it, so I'll spare the details and cut to the opinion.  It's not that it's bad, exactly.  The acting is great and the actors well-chosen, but...well...damn the Continental Congress makes for boring television!  And I'm honestly rather surprised that I reacted this way seeing how I love history, and would have minored in it had I not listened to some whack job college advisor who was a bit too convincing that a Earth Science minor would make me more marketable than a History one.  (For the record, it didn't.)  

Actually, the first thirty minutes of the first installment were pretty engrossing, but then somewhere between tarring and feathering a British merchant and Abigail Adams's fight with small pox I became all fidgety and unable to resist the sexy pull of all that unfolded laundry.  The wonky camera angles were irritating in their frequency and nonsensicality (tilted to show the burning intensity John Adams must have felt when spreading manure over his farmland, I suppose?) and by Episode 2 the whole thing felt a bit interminable.

I don't know.  I'm loathe to quit when in the middle of something, so I might finish it despite all that.  

But then again, I might not.