Historical...Fiction?

We weren’t one minute into the show when Ed turns to me and says, “I don’t think I’m going to like this. Where are the Redcoats British accents?”

Since I was exhausted and expected to fall asleep within fifteen minutes anyhow, I was more willing to give this series we had picked up at the library at least a five-minute chance…okay three minutes. Two? I probably should have just agreed with Ed and let it go at that.

I’m not a historian. I might qualify as a history buff since I like to read histories, bios and historical fiction. Since Ed doesn’t touch a book with a one-hundred-foot-pole, he’s probably not qualified as anything on the history scale. But even he, with his public school education, knows something about the American Revolution. And it doesn’t include the following:

1)   The Redcoats had American accents.

2)   Sam Adams was the 18^th Century equivalent of James Bond.

I had picked up the History Channel television series Sons of Liberty thinking it might be an interesting drama to watch about Boston as events led up to the Revolution. You know: the Boston Tea Party, Concord and Lexington, Bunker Hill.  All the history I miss about New England. Now I know I shouldn’t expect exact history when watching such things. Watching the Continental Congress would be equivalent to watching CNN. Some dramas you even know will stretch the truth (like the series Turn) simply because of their subject matter (spies). But I expected at least a little authenticity. An expectation which went out the door within two minutes of watching…and dropped further and further until I fell asleep, never turned the series on again and returned it to the library in scorn.

Why, you ask, was it so ridiculously horrendous? Well, you don’t have to be a historian to know that Sam Adams did not run through the streets of Boston, climbing up houses and dancing across steep colonial roofs in order to escape British Redcoats (with nary a British accent between them). Even if Sam Adams had been an extremely healthy 42 or 43 year old (which I sincerely doubt since any portrait I’ve seen of him has him slightly on the rotund side), it’s still doubtful the British chased him around the narrow Boston streets like he was James Bond. And anyone who has the simplest knowledge of the Adams family knows that Sam Adams was a good dozen years older than his distant cousin John Adams, while this series has that completely in reverse. And even though I’ve never read a ton about John Hancock, they portray him as a rather namby-pamby sort of snob. And while I can believe the snob part, I always thought him a bit more politically astute over namby-pamby.

So, if you’re looking for historical fiction (note the underlining) this would be the series for you. But if you’re looking for looking for history, pick up a book. Redeem your time – don’t waste it.