Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticToo often, period pieces about the making of America treat the past with undue dignity, turning the raucousness and rambunctiousness of a two-and-a-quarter-century pageant of personalities into a chamber piece.
American history is serious, sure, but it’s also giddy and strange, and too few entertainments treat it that way. It’s perhaps likely that the character of John Brown — the abolitionist who believed himself possessed by the spirit of the Lord and whose 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry may just have kicked off the Civil War — would tend to resist this sort of false gravity: His mission, for all its consequence and seriousness of purpose, was also fueled by a particularly American mania.
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