Meet Ben Franklin

Why watch Ken Burns’ riveting, four-hour Benjamin Franklin (PBS, April 4-5, 8 p.m. ET), narrated by Peter Coyote, with performances and dramatic readings by Mandy Patinkin and Paul Giamatti? “He is the most compelling personality in America in the 18th century, as Muhammad Ali, the subject of my last film, was of the 20th,” says Burns, 68.

“He was the man most responsible for victory in the Revolution, a scientist of Nobel quality. He launched America’s first public library, organized a volunteer fire company and founded the University of Pennsylvania. His annual publication, Poor Richard’s Almanack, set a model for future humorists such as Mark Twain — its maxims are still part of our shared lexicon. And his famous experiments with electricity led to one of his most important inventions — the lightning rod.” This dazzled Europeans, who tended to think of Americans as dim. To them he was America’s brightest star, and he inspired France to finance our bid for independence.

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The oldest by far of the mostly young Founding Fathers, he was arguably the wisest. “He wrote the second-greatest sentence in the English language, right after ‘I love you’: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ ” says Burns. Franklin added the famous line when he rewrote Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson had called the truths “sacred and undeniable,” but Franklin changed it to “self-evident,” like the electrifying result of his key-and-kite experiment. “That’s a scientist’s addition,” says Burns.

Plus, his complicated personality makes for excellent TV drama. “He could be whimsical yet philosophical, folksy yet unforgiving, generous yet shrewdly calculating, and broad-minded yet deeply prejudiced. For a man so associated with individual liberty, Franklin enslaved at least six people and did not become an abolitionist until very late in life. Franklin's newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, advertised the sale of enslaved people and published notices of runaways. And while he publicly denounced white settlers who indiscriminately killed Indigenous people, he also championed the expansion of white settlements onto Indigenous lands.”