After installments that profiled Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, the Nat Geo dramatic series “Genius” turns to the life of the singular talent that is Aretha Franklin with “Genius: Aretha.” Cynthia Erivo (“Harriet”) steps into the giant shoes of this music legend, even admirably tackling some of Franklin’s biggest hits herself, as writer Suzan-Lori Parks (a Pulitzer Prize winner for “Topdog/Underdog”) jumps back and forth, connecting Franklin’s youth to the decisions she made and art she produced as an adult. It’s a smart program with resonant performances that sometimes falters due to shallow dialogue and inconsistent focus, but there’s enough to like here for fans of Aretha Franklin, which really should be everyone.
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Aretha Franklin is alternately played by Erivo and newcomer Shaian Jordan, who plays “Little Re” as a child, living in the long shadow of her father C.L. Franklin (Courtney B. Vance). As presented here—and it should perhaps be noted that the Franklin family not only didn’t endorse this project here but have encouraged people not to watch it—Aretha’s father was an influential force of nature. The popular preacher took a young Aretha on the gospel circuit, where he preached during the day and enjoyed the club scene at night. As Ted White (Malcolm Barrett), Aretha’s abusive first husband, says at one point, dad enjoyed Saturday nights as much as Sunday mornings.
Parks mostly avoids a dull chronological biopic structure by constantly moving back and forth between Franklin’s youth and her rise to fame, often framing her life with the men who shaped it. For example, the premiere details how much White’s jealousy and insecurity shadowed Franklin’s early years of work with Jerry Wexler (David Cross), often injecting himself into situations in which he wasn’t needed or much worse behind closed doors. On the night Franklin is named the Queen of Soul in Detroit, White gets physically violent with her, and the final image of the premiere is a powerful one that reflects how little the public image of someone can reveal about their private life.
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The structure alternates between a blessing and a curse. While the flashbacks can sometimes drain momentum, the show is elevated when they feel truly intertwined with the present-day material. Take the sixth episode, which details the production of “Amazing Grace,” one of the best gospel albums of all time and connects the emotion in that recording not only to how her time in the church shaped a young Aretha but how she dealt with the death of her mother. It’s easy to see the history in Franklin’s performance in the Sydney Pollack film of the same name, released three years ago after years on the shelf, but Erivo, Vance, and the rest of the cast add nuance and depth to this moment in music history because they fill in the details regarding how much that show was a turning point for Franklin, exorcising demons of her past to give herself a happier future.
Characters other than Aretha and C.L. can feel underwritten or, worse, like plot devices. Arguments with Aretha’s brother Cecil (Steven Norfleet) and sisters Erma (Patrice Covington) and Carolyn (Rebecca Naomi Jones) late in the series don’t have the weight they should because the characters have been so undefined. There aren’t really weak links in the cast, but there are underdeveloped characters everywhere, backup singers to the story of the Queen of Soul. Parks constantly returns to the father-daughter dynamic and how it shaped her art, which makes sense, but it’s at the expense of other stories from her life and other people who found their way into her orbit, including famous faces like Martin Luther King Jr., Curtis Mayfield, Glynn Turman, and Clive Davis, who also executive produced the series.
As for Erivo, she has a strong presence when she’s singing, but gets somewhat lost in the storytelling in early episodes that make her more of an observer or respondent to the men in her life. On the one hand, this makes sense—Franklin channeled her expression through her talent before she found her voice away from the microphone—but it can make her feel like a bit of a question mark in early episodes, especially when the men like White and C.L. Franklin steal focus.
Erivo herself would likely admit that anyone playing someone who owned a room as completely as Aretha Franklin in a dramatic series is bound to come up a little short when it comes to capturing a personality that is so widely beloved and truly larger than life. She gives what is ultimately a very nuanced and complex performance, deconstructing what is so widely known about a household name in a way that makes Franklin feel three-dimensional without ever resorting to biopic clichés. The writing has a habit of doing that in some superficial dialogue and clichéd biopic scene construction but Erivo and Vance ground it whenever possible. They’re both excellent.
“Genius: Aretha” is the story of someone who was constantly being pushed and pulled, mostly by the men in her life, but also by a growing interest in civil rights and the music producers who thought they knew what was best for her career. The show is at its best when it’s really digging into the complex life that shaped Franklin’s decisions. She became a mother at 12 and her own mom left because of dad’s constant infidelity. She had to grow up way too young, and yet she still was forced to bow to the will of men in her life like her father and first husband. She would watch her dad preach about the fallibility of Jesus Christ after witnessing his infidelity at a part the night before. Religion, family, and even sexuality blend into one memory, and then come out in her music later in life.
Aretha Franklin found a voice as strong off the stage as she did on it, standing up for herself to find her own happiness and truth. That’s when she became a genius. That kind of storytelling is when “Genius: Aretha” really works, and there’s enough of it. Well, at least enough to make viewers listen to nothing but Aretha Franklin recordings for the rest of the month. [B-]
“Genius: Aretha” debuts on Nat Geo on March 21.
