‘Franklin’ Is About the French Revolution As Much As America’s

French money made America possible, but France’s aristocratic decadence made the French Revolution inevitable

Image Credit: Apple TV+

America circa the 1780s could not have defeated the British without massive infusions of French cash. How Benjamin Franklin maneuvered to ascend the heights of Parisian society and secure said funds for his fledgling country across the Atlantic is the purported premise for Apple TV’s excellent miniseries Franklin.

Now you may ask yourself: would I cast Michael Douglas as Benjamin Franklin? But can the question be anything but rhetorical? Douglas is a canny actor, no doubt, always watchable, but he doesn’t possess the smirking brilliance necessary to convey Franklin’s joyous rout of everyone he rolls with his old country bumpkin routine. (Douglas is also noticeably too svelte to be portraying Philadelphia’s OG revolutionary.)

This iteration of Franklin’s sojourn in France is a sensory wonder, worthy of your time for the sets and costumes alone. The ludicrous decadence of aristocratic France has perhaps never before achieved this level of appalling depravity. I began to feel that if one more pudged up middle-aged man in ghastly white powder and ruffled floral breeches waddled across one more sprawling…