Though only six years old, the Noiser Podcast Network has already made a name as the place to go for immersive and informative historical shows. No wonder then, in the 250th year of America's birth, the network's latest release is the eight-part series, Founding Fathers: An American Dream.
In keeping with Noiser's propensity for recruiting name actors as narrators, Founding Fathers is hosted by Clarke Peters of The Wire fame. The podcast spans more than a century of history, all the way from the 1706 birth of Benjamin Franklin, through the transatlantic rows about unfair taxation that sowed discontent between Britain and the American settlers, through to the eight long, bloody years of the Revolutionary War and the installation of George Washington as the new country's first president.
Founding Fathers also covers the first couple of elections afterwards, all the way up to the deaths of early presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, which, poetically, both happened on July 4th 1826.
Peters's wonderfully rich, resonant voice, which sometimes recalls that of the "In A World…" movie trailer narrator, Don LaFontaine, is among the show's chief assets.
While the show is called "Founding Fathers," the actual purview is wider, expanding beyond the seven white men most commonly credited with birthing the new country. As the timeline progresses, the podcast keeps an eye on groups often overlooked in works about the founding of America: women (though this is largely just through the lens of future first lady Abigail Adams), Native Americans, and enslaved people. It's the latter that serve as the chief demonstration of the hypocrisy woven into America's founding; the fact that Thomas Jefferson could be writing the words, "All men are created equal" as he was surrounded by men he owned majorly undercuts the grand hopeful vision of the founders' dream.
While Founding Fathers certainly doesn't shy away from the shameful parts of the founders' lives, neither is it an exercise in simple character assassination. These men were human beings who lived in vastly different times, and the podcast examines their contradictions with a proper historical framing.
Founding Fathers is the second edition of "Noiser Presents," a vertical the network describes as "deep-dive history boxsets." The first was last year's Titanic: Ship of Dreams. There was a buildup and an epilogue, but the majority of that podcast took place over that one fateful voyage. Because the scope of Founding Fathers is far broader and has a central event – the Revolutionary War – that lasted eight years rather than four days, it is missing its predecessor's thrilling near minute-by-minute narrative momentum. It's a drier show that feels more like something you'd listen to in parts in a museum rather than see playing out vividly in your mind's eye.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams spanned thirteen episodes, whereas Founding Fathers only eight, which means that you get far less granular detail, especially considering how much more ground the latter has to cover. Between the lives of the founding fathers and ordinary folk, the development of the Continental Congress, a wealth of transatlantic political manoeuvrings, all the big famous battles of the Revolutionary War, and the establishment of the separate branches of government and political parties, there's just too immense a swathe of history to finagle into the eight-hour run time in a satisfying way. As such, sometimes it feels like the podcast is touching on certain names and events purely as a box-ticking exercise – this is particularly true of the final episode, which leaps through a quarter-century of vital foundational ground without taking a breath.
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For the most part, Founding Fathers does a good job contextualizing. In addition to Peters, we regularly hear the voices of various academics chime in to explain the import of historical developments, or to give background on the character of major figures. It's an achievement that the podcast manages to cogently squeeze as much as it does into a comparatively short duration. Yet, when straining to elucidate so many events from so many angles, it was probably inevitable that the immersive aspect which Noiser is known for would suffer. More episodes would have helped here.
Nevertheless, in an era when those in power are all too eager to brush over the more complicated, less savoury aspects of the nation's history, the podcast's dedication to embracing complexity is admirable. And you could do an awful lot worse than listening to Clarke Peters' beautifully sonorous tones for eight hours straight.
