One of the most remarkable features of the current season is that so many people we know have been racing home to turn on the television to watch neither the ball game, nor the Democratic debates, nor even the progress through America of Benedict XVI, remarkable though that has been. Rather, they’ve been clicking on a made-for-television series about our second president, John Adams. The series has been airing on HBO, and it’s been a long time since we can recall a television event quite like it. We’ve been encountering all sorts of people talking about it — at the gym, at Passover seders, at dinner parties — and the question that has been nagging at us is why.

Certainly the series is beautifully crafted, with superb performances by Paul Giamatti as Adams, Laura Linney as Abigail, Stephen Dillane as Jefferson, and Thomas Wilkinson as Franklin. It features, in contradistinction to earlier movies we’ve seen of the Founding, an astonishingly credible David Morse as George Washington. It is true that there is much in the film to annoy the most knowledgeable viewers; Adams never witnessed a tarring and feathering; his children were inoculated for small pox at a different place than appears in the film; the encounter with General Knox leading a team of oxen past Adams’s home in Braintree didn’t happen.

What did happen, and what this series dramatizes in such a powerful way, is that from the crucible of the revolution there was created a president whose personality has become part of our national character. We all know about Washington, the famous taciturnity, the natural authority, the aloofness, the refusal to be drawn into European entanglements. These are captured in scenes — we think particularly of his lunch with Adams, his rage at Jefferson, his showdown with the French ambassador, Genet, who wanted to recruit in America soldiers for fighting the British — that one just wants to watch over and over.

We know less, the way our history has been taught, about Adams’s combination of diffidence and determination, his sense of being torn between the law and the revolution, his performance as a father, his fear of the mob, his emergence as among the most patriotic of men, his appreciation for the concept of a Constitution that will be able to bind not just the generation that wrote it but the generations to come, down through the centuries. We’ve all read about his magnificent wife and her famous letters, but to see their romance brought out on film, tears and sexuality and all, is just a remarkable thing.

And what a time to bring out this film. While a modern American administration is wrestling with the question of whether to go to war in Iran, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Americans are going home to watch the giants who created America wrestle with the danger of a war with France. At a time when our candidates and Congress are feuding with our president over wiretaps on international cell phone calls and spying on international money transfers, Americans are racing to turn on television to watch the president who signed the Alien and Sedition Acts.

We, for one, find the whole story not only inspiring but reassuring. It’s not that the predicament our new nation faced during the revolution and Adams years in the presidency was so much greater than our own, though the revolutionaries who created our country were, in fact, endangered to a far greater degree that any of our leaders are today and, indeed, the country was then far more in extremis. But our own predicament is not to be sneered at. We, too, live in a dangerous time. What inspires and reassures is the example of Adams and the values to which he clung. And also the fact that, even with such deep differences as divided our government and established us on the path to a two-party system, both sides turned out to be profoundly patriotic.