Patriarchs is a new six-episode audio podcast dramatizing the 50-year relationship between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, drawn entirely from real historical letters and memoirs. It doesn't sugarcoat the founders — slavery, Sally Hemings, and their deep contradictions are front and center. The executive producer calls it the most important work of their career. It's available now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, with a public radio broadcast on WYPR Baltimore on July 1st and July 4th.
Family, Friends, and Neighbors:
As we approach the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I have been pondering truth, power, and who counts as fully human. I am extremely proud to be the Executive Producer of the new audio drama Patriarchs, a vivid, unvarnished audience with the people who wrestled with those questions first—and did not always get them right.
The podcast is now available in its entirety on your favorite podcast apps. Here are links to the Apple Podcasts and Spotify Podcasts. Please listen, rate, review, subscribe and SHARE. This is the most consequential work of my 30+years-career. The response to the podcast has been so great that WYPR Baltimore Public Media will be broadcasting the exclusive World Public Media debut of Patriarchs on July 1st at 9pm ET and replaying the three-hour version of it on the 4th of July at 6pm ET.
A six-episode podcast, Patriarchs answers the hard questions about how America began, who paid the price, and what kind of republic it has become. It is an intimate drama focused on the dynamic between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams during the founding of the United States: brilliant founders who are also flawed fathers, husbands, slaveholders, and partisans.
While the term "unprecedented times” has earned some cachet as we examine our current political climate, Patriarchs demonstrates that the issues with which all Americans are currently wrestling have been baked into our collective ethos since the very founding of this nation. For the past 10 years, I have been producing 4th of July Specials for CBS News Radio, talking with dozens of highly accomplished historians and academicians. Despite the extensive and in-depth knowledge I have gained over the past decade, Patriarchs still surprised, shocked, and amazed me with revelations of which I had little-to-no knowledge. I believe that all listeners to the podcast will have a similar experience.
Written by award-winning playwright Jim McGrath, Patriarchs stars America’s preeminent interpreter of Shakespeare, Stacy Keach, as Thomas Jefferson, and six-time Helen Hayes Award-winner Edward Gero as John Adams. Patriarchs opens at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1776 and concludes on Independence Day July 4, 1826.
During that 50-year span, Patriarchs chronicles the origin of our country through the most consequential relationship in American history: the friendship, rivalry, animosity, and reconciliation of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Every scene, every argument, every confession in Patriarchs is drawn from real letters, speeches, and memoirs of the people who created this nation.
In addition to Adams and Jefferson, prominently features Sally Hemings centered not as rumor but as a speaking, thinking presence whose choices and constraints shape Jefferson’s life. Patriarchs boldly confronts the reality of slavery and sexual exploitation in the founding generation. The audio drama also includes Abigail Adams, one of the sharpest political minds of the age, whose letters slice cleanly through ego and ideology.