Pretty much all of these - along with Clarence’s thunderous sermons - are energetic show-stoppers, which ensure that, at least within each episode, Aretha never flags. The too-neat aftermath of that lopsided sibling rivalry underscores how little we ultimately learn about the adult Aretha’s relationships to her sisters (the other played by Rebecca Naomi Jones), or any other woman for that matter, beyond ruthless competition.Įach episode features two or three numbers by Erivo, Jordan, or any number of guest stars playing contemporary luminaries like Lena Horne and Dinah Washington. The characterization especially falters when Aretha cruelly snatches an opportunity from her younger sister Erma (Patrice Covington), whose nascent career can’t compare with that of the Queen of Soul. But many of the decisions that Aretha makes as a 20- or 30-something are also difficult to understand, like why she sticks with Ted for so long. In these Eisenhower-era scenes, it makes sense that many of the storylines involve things happening to Aretha, even if they frustratingly deprive us of insight into how the character felt about, say, her aborted education or her alarmingly early parenthood. Like many child prodigies, Aretha spent more time around adults than fellow kids, especially once she started touring with her father as a preteen. (The period gowns by costume designer Jennifer Bryan are appropriately glitzy and thoughtful.) But the time-hopping drama, even when it shows us the most formative chapter of Franklin’s life, never really lets us in on who its subject was. Aretha takes the opportunity to reintroduce its titular icon, especially to younger audiences, as a political activist, an industry trailblazer, even a glamourpuss fashion plate. In other words, there’s no shortage of tales to tell about Franklin, whose life story is still relatively unknown to many. In her mid-twenties, she’d suffer the death of her longtime friend, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Genius: aretha cast free#
(Previous seasons focused on Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso.) Spanning three decades in the first seven episodes - with talented newcomer Shaian Jordan playing Franklin during her preteen-dom and early adolescence - Aretha is largely a portrait of the artist as a young woman attempting to free herself from the control of the men around her.Ĭynthia Erivo and Roxane Gay in Conversation: Inclusion, Politics and That Possible EGOT Titleįranklin had a wildly eventful (and painful) youth, from her parents’ divorce when she was six and her mother Barbara’s premature death only a few years later to giving birth to her first child at age 12 (and her second just a couple of years later) and being pulled from school in the tenth grade to join the gospel circuit during segregation. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks ( Topdog/Underdog) shepherds this third iteration of the biographical anthology series. That’s a quality Erivo shares with Aretha Franklin, making the London-born multi-hyphenate a fantastic choice to play the late Queen of Soul in the eight-part Nat Geo miniseries Genius: Aretha. Here is a vocalist who, when performing, appears as if she’s doing exactly what she was put on this earth to do, and to behold that is to feel that the world is alright, at least for a few minutes. Watching Cynthia Erivo sing on screen is often a restorative experience.