TV Review: NatGeo’s ‘Genius: Aretha’ Franklin Series

A its best, the NatGeo series starring Cynthia Erivo as the Queen of Soul herself is a gripping, generational family drama. But it never stops getting in its own way.
Photo: Courtesy of National Geographic

The Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin was a complex figure, a titan of American music whose voice could wring emotion from even the coldest hearts, whose body of work exemplified and entangled many strains of Black music, touching on jazz, blues, gospel, soul, rock, and disco, and creating brilliant combinations of all of the above. The string of albums between 1967’s I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You and 1972’s Amazing Grace broke boundaries and set records. Franklin remains on the shortlist of the most-awarded artists in Grammy history, and her gobsmacking 52 top-ten placements on Billboard’s long-running R&B singles chart is matched only by James Brown and Drake. Aretha was the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a no-brainer for a performer whose genius as a singer and an interpreter of songs also came with natural gifts as a songwriter and producer. If you covered her song, you worried; if she covered yours, she blew you out of the water. In her 20s, Franklin made Otis Redding’s “Respect” her own. In her 70s, she made Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” look as carefree and easy as hopscotch.

Aretha loved to sing, but she didn’t necessarily enjoy the politics of celebrity. Famously, she was never much for chitchat, preferring to let her formidable instrument do much of the talking. At her peak, Aretha was prone to blowing off public engagements when things got too hot in her personal life, taking a hit to her reputation in the music business, and she seemed to hate explaining herself. “Pain is sometimes a private matter,” Franklin wrote in her 1999 autobiography Aretha: From These Roots, recalling the death of her mother in her youth. This has made the business of documenting the singer’s life a prickly one. For years, she fought the release of Sydney Pollack’s 1972 Amazing Grace concert film, in spite of the spellbinding footage he’d captured. Franklin first started talking about a biopic in 2008, floating Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson in the lead role but insinuating that nothing would come to fruition without her approval; the result, this fall’s Respect, wouldn’t begin filming until 2019. Green-lighting an Aretha season of NatGeo’s Genius series after her death in 2018 was something of a shock, and the family asked the audience to boycott. After seeing the finished product — whose finale aired Wednesday night, seemingly timed to Franklin’s birthday, March 25 — you get why.

Genius: Aretha isn’t awful, but it’s very messy. Cynthia Erivo is a fantastic actress and singer, and in the titular role of Aretha, she makes the hardest part — mimicking one of America’s greatest voices — seem manageable. But she doesn’t necessarily feel like Aretha. (Barring Luke James’s turn as Glynn Turman, Franklin’s second husband, and Omar Dorsey’s unnerving accuracy as gospel giant James Cleveland, no one much passes for the historical figure they’re playing. The most unfortunate bit of casting is T.I., not a month after sex-trafficking allegations, in the role of Franklin’s tour manager and lover Ken Cunningham, who always clocks as T.I.) Erivo’s deft balance of bluntness, stoicism, and volcanic emotion as Franklin navigates conflicting personal and professional lives is admirable, and Courtney B. Vance’s portrayal of Aretha’s father, legendary activist and gospel’s “Million Dollar Voice” C.L. Franklin, visualizes the many complexities of a figure whose impact on the Black church is profound, but whose faults added weight to his family’s already heavy load. Genius supposes Aretha’s blending of spiritual and emotional interests in her art is inherited from her father, learned from following him around on the surprisingly lustful gospel touring circuit in the mid-’50s as it became apparent that the child possessed a once-in-a-lifetime gift. By day, young Ree is miming the moves of singer Clara Ward of gospel’s Famous Ward Singers; by night, she’s ducking C.L. at parties where both the father and the daughter try and fail to conceal their appetites for breaking the rules. You could argue Genius is as much C.L.’s story as Aretha’s, and it’s important to set up the relationships with controlling men the singer would spend much of her early career bucking. If it’s not C.L. telling her what to do, it’s Ted White, her first husband and manager. If it’s not Ted, it’s one of the many music-industry men who get flustered when a woman flexes her talent and power. At its best, Genius is a gripping, generational family drama…