Chronicling The Adams Chronicles
May 7, 2008

More than 30 years before HBO premiered John Adams, this year's eight-hour-plus series about our country’s 2^nd President, WNET (a forerunner of PBS) did a little production of its own on the respected politician and diplomat, not to mention his son John Quincy and wife Abigail. The Adams Chronicles starring George Grizzard, Lisa Lucas and William Daniels, clocked in at 13 hours and was originally broadcast in 1976, ultimately going on to win a bunch of Emmy Awards and igniting the decades-long popularity of network television mini-series. Last month, Acorn Media released The Adams Chronicles as a four-disc DVD collection.

In a recent phone interview, series creator and producer Virginia Kassel remembered how it was the spirit

“It was a very interesting time-- we were in Vietnam, coming up on the elections and the Bicentennial was looming,” Kassel recalled. “Advocacy, action and catching the spirit of the time was our goal."

According to Kassel, who was working at WNET in the late Sixties, she suggested the idea about a series on the Adams to WNET vice president of programming William Cobin at a time when the station was “quite committed to public affairs” and “doing all sorts of guerrilla TV productions.” Her aim was to commit to the series so that it could be ready for a Bicentennial broadcast.

“It took a couple of years to break down the stories and characters and the tragedies and triumphs, but we did it,” she said, pointing out that the 13-hour production was completed in only 19 weeks.

“That’s not healthy,” Kassel laughed. “In another life, we would have had two writers, a longer production period, more than one director, and so on. And we weren’t interested in just wigs and shoe buckles. It was luck and serendipity and working for a place that had the time and interest in putting it together that made it happen.”

Posted by Laurence Lerman on May 7, 2008 | Comments (0)