By Bill Sullivan
How true is “TURN?”
The television series based on the Culper spy ring during the American Revolution returns for its second season on AMC April 13.
Much of the first season was filmed in Virginia, and a number of scenes from Season Two were filmed in Williamsburg.
A panel recently convened at the College of William & Mary featured a discussion among academic historians and key players from the TV drama, including producers, actors and Alexander Rose, the author of “Washington’s Spies,” the book on which the series is based.
The hosts were exceedingly polite to their guests, praising the characters and plot, and offering few disagreements.
But the discussion did reveal the challenges of bringing history to the small screen and some of the compromises made in the process.
So how true is “TURN?” What does it even mean to be “historically accurate?”
There is more than one way to measure. There are plot points. We know some events that occurred at specific times in a particular sequence.
We also have an idea of the material culture: what people wore, the tools they used, the kinds of houses they lived in.
And we know that individuals, most of whom left scant traces in the historical record, made the history with the choices they made every day in their communities.
Unlike academic history, and much like Colonial Williamsburg, television requires the presentation of all facets of life. The authenticity is measured not only by a chronology of actual events, but also by capturing the look, feel and, yes, sound of a distant time.
Drama makes particular demands on storytelling, beginning with the need to invent plausible dialogue. Without recordings, clues to 18th-century speaking patterns have to be teased out of written records.
Actor Jamie Bell talked about how he settled on an Irish brogue for his character, Woodhull.
“I think the Irish sound has an underdog tone to it. I don’t know why that is, but it has a liberating sound, a heroic sound.”
So Bell decided that was how Woodhull would sound. He also gave him a distinctive walk. Such decisions inevitably color the viewer’s perceptions and by extension, the history.
There’s a stronger historical record for what to wear. “Costume is important to an actor because it tells the story from the outside before you have to say anything,” Bell said.
There are limits. In one scene, “TURN” executive producer Criaig Silverstein said, Bell’s character, Woodhull, races out of the house “bare-chested” because a building is on fire. “Our costumer said he would be wearing a nightshirt like Ebenezer Scrooge, but if we did that the audience would just laugh. We made a conscious choice” to go with the technically less-accurate apparel.
Heather Lind, who portrays Anna Strong in the series, talked about how her role gave her a surprising appreciation for 18th-century women—but not in the way she expected.
“I expected to understand the restrictiveness of women during that period by wearing these costumes-the corset and the huge amounts of skirts and petticoats.”
But what she discovered was the possibility of perseverance. “Women were constantly trying to get out of the boxes they were put in. I think that’s an important truth that history doesn’t always tell.”
“Our job is about the human beings,” said Samuel Roukin, who plays John Graves Simcoe in “TURN.” “If we’re concentrating on other things, my mind isn’t where it needs to be.
“We have people who are hired by [the producers] to be the experts. We pick up a gun and there’s a guy who knows everything about that weapon. And our job is to make it look truthful and real. But we don’t know. We defer [to these experts].”
Other sacrifices are made for clarity. British Redcoats were not actually stationed on Setauket, Long Island, at the time “TURN” places them there, but their presence provides a visual cue for the viewer that the area was dominated by Loyalists.
“To bring people into a world they don’t know, you have to give them some touchstones from the world they are familiar with,” Silverstein said.
Chronology was also adjusted for the sake of narrative. The Culper Spy Ring wasn’t active until 1778, but the series sets the story to begin in 1776 as an easily identifiable date for revolution.
The producers of “TURN” see their show as a fresh approach to the Revolution. “Nobody knows the Culper Ring,” said Silverstein, calling it a David vs. Goliath story. The spy story offered “a way to shake up a preserved-in-amber tale.”
Besides, he said, “We couldn’t afford the battles.”
“There is a difference between accuracy and truth,” said Silverstein, suggesting the possibility that drama had the ability to present a literary truth that would capture the essence of the history without being subject to too many “tedious” facts.
Bell brought that point home by describing the evolution of his character. “As a character evolves through a season, you want to see physical changes, how his change inside is represented on the outside. When we first meet him, he’s wearing a leather jacket and he’s got a beanie on, he looks like a regular kid you’d see at Whole Foods. This is a cabbage farmer. As the season progresses, he starts getting more formal and in the new season he changes even more.”
The actor’s interpretation is what makes his character three-dimensional, a plausible historical figure. The character’s walk, his gestures and his speaking patterns color the viewer’s impressions just as surely as his words and actions.
But historian Karin Wulf objected to the show’s apparent distancing from academic history. “We work interpretively, too,” she said. While many people are deeply concerned about having the right color uniform or the correct buttons, historians look for broad explanations for why events unfolded in a particular way.
So back to the original question: how true is “TURN?” The answer may very well be as complex as the events it portrays.
