If you'd asked me to suggest a hero for a blockbuster adventure, I'd be pretty far down the list before I suggested Benjamin Franklin. But seeing Michael Douglas in the role for the forthcoming Apple TV Plus series Franklin suggests I've missed a trick. It turns out that the writer, inventor and eventual abolitionist was quite the adventurer.
The new series, which debuts in April, is based on the book A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America by Pulitzer prize winner Stacy Schiff, and it follows Franklin on the greatest gamble of his career. A secret mission to France in which he outwitted British spies, French informers and hostile colleagues alike in order to forge a Franco-American alliance and a subsequent peace treaty with England.
