Viewpoints: First-Rate First Family

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

That genius of the vulgar, Harry Cohn, always refused to permit movies about the American Revolution to be made on his Columbia Pictures lot. He believed that men in knee breeches and powdered wigs, spouting the stilted locutions of the 18th century, looked and sounded too silly for audiences to take seriously.

He had a point, and it is probably the reason why, of all the great events in American history, the first of them has received the least attention from films and television. The mildest praise you can offer The Adams Chronicles (PBS, Tuesdays, 9 p.m., E.S.T.) is that it is the exception that sorely tries Cohn's law. More important, a sampling of the 13-episode series finally lays to rest the cliche that only the British are capable of producing complex family sagas.

But the most significant thing about The Adams Chronicles is that it succeeds in its own terms--in dramatizing that usually unyielding material, the lives of the great. The writers have found dramatic forms spacious enough to include the acute psychological detail, and firm enough in outline to maintain reasonable suspense about precisely how the characters will respond to historical events. Solidly professional direction and an expert, huge--172 speaking parts--corps of actors have completed the project. They succeed in humanizing a family to which we have, somehow, attached the word "distinguished" and then let slip from our historical imaginations.

Shrewd Depiction. The first episode, which takes John Adams from failure as a rustic lawyer to the center of revolutionary agitation in colonial Boston, is a fair example of how the series works. For Adams' rise to large status in our political history is paralleled by a shrewd depiction of his personal progress from a bachelorhood feverish with suppressed sexuality to a courtship of Abigail (appealingly played by Kathryn Walker) that is near-comic in its ardor.

By the time that their children start to come along, Adams is only vaguely affectionate, so preoccupied is he by public life. As played by that wonderfully energetic actor, George Grizzard, Adams is a man possessed by both a bustling ego and overwhelming idealism. He is saved from pomposity by his ability to take an ironic attitude toward his own excesses. In short, there is a density and richness in this characterization.

It is easy to see Adams as the American-style politician, brother under that wig to all the people now running up and down the country propelled by the curious belief that they are qualified to be President. But Adams is so human and unself-conscious in the anguish of frustration or the exhilaration of accomplishment that one often forgets to think of him as anything so grand as a leader, let alone as a founding father. That stress on the human basics is, of course, what all historical dramas should aim for and what so few of them actually achieve.

One hopes the series can survive John Adams' and Grizzard's demise five episodes hence. (It will continue with 17 Adamses and end with Author Henry Adams and his brother Charles Francis II, who in 1890 lost control of the Union Pacific Railroad to Jay Gould.) One hopes, too, that the awkwardness that inevitably occurs when famous historical phrases have to be worked into ordinary conversation will diminish as the series moves on to the first John's slightly less imposing descendants. One wishes, finally, that producers would either abandon the use of tape for large enterprises of this sort or learn to light scenes so that they have the glow and richness of well-made film.

But these are small matters. What is important is that public broadcasting has brought off what commercial broad casting has not even attempted -- a Bicentennial project in which an ambitious conception is executed with matching taste and intelligence. The Adams Chronicles cost $5.2 million to produce, and is thus the most ambitious dramatic project undertaken by U.S. public broadcasting. It achieved a certain notoriety last fall when huge cost overruns on the series forced its producing station -- New York's WNET -- to curtail some local programming in order to pay its bills. But far better a cost overrun than the more com mon television complaint -- a talent underrun.

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