![]() The women in the scientist’s life - an early girlfriend, Marie (Shannon Tarbet), his second wife, Elsa (Emily Watson), and his first, Mileva Marić (Samantha Colley) - are nearly as central to Genius as the genius himself. So Einstein wasn’t just a master at coming up with equations that explain the speed of light. (Nat Geo: where we take the notion that people love science extremely literally.) “Move in with me, ” he begs her afterward she protests, noting that he is married. In what feels like an attempt to establish that this drama will not be some staid, multipart physics lesson, Genius’s first glimpse of Einstein arrives in a sex scene, in which the recognizably frizzy-haired scholar of the early ’20s is banging his secretary Betty in his office before a class. The first episode, directed by Howard, toggles frequently between time periods and settings, primarily the 1890s, when young Einstein is at odds with his father and determined to study science and mathematics at Zurich’s Polytechnic Institute, and the 1920s, when the now-famous professor is wrestling with the rise of the Nazis, who see Einstein as an anti-establishment threat that should be eliminated. “The distinction between the past, present, and future is but a stubborn illusion,” Einstein says during a lecture in episode one, and the way Genius plays with time and space seems to prove that point. If anything, ten hours may not be enough to capture the potentially too vast narrative ambitions established in its first two episodes. Given the vast scope of its story, adapted by showrunner Ken Biller and writer Noah Pink from Walter Isaacson’s book Einstein: His Life and Universe, television feels like a more accommodating home for it. Hence, Genius - a look at the life of Albert Einstein, played in his later years by Rush and in his earlier ones by Johnny Flynn - is a ten-episode series that marks the first foray into original scripted fare for National Geographic. ![]() ![]() They’re works of television, a perfectly respectable and exciting medium that just happens to have more high-profile, esteemed Hollywood creators working in it than ever before. TV series: They’re the new movies! Except they’re not. In 2017, it’s a TV show because, as we all know, television is now regularly bathed in just as much prestige as the award-season movie slate. Once upon a time, a biopic about Albert Einstein - particularly one starring Geoffrey Rush and co-produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, who also has a directing credit on the project - would have been a major motion picture and part of the flurry of end-of-the-year Oscar conversation.
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