The scripts stumble, particularly, when it comes to contextualizing the development of the singer’s political engagement, from a childhood under the influence of C.L. The visual details, from exquisite costumes to sets that precisely capture their respective places and times, are equally virtuosic. Franklin’s voice was one of a kind, but Erivo-a brilliant performer who won an Emmy, a Tony and a Grammy for her work in Broadway’s The Color Purple, and is bound to EGOT any minute now-does its versatility justice. There are episodes that trace the making of legendary albums like Amazing Grace (the live gospel recording documented in a breathtaking 2018 film) and Young, Gifted and Black. The show’s musical elements, including several full-song performances in each hour, dazzle. To watch Re-already a mother but conspicuously childlike in dresses with Peter Pan collars and sausage-curled ponytails fastened with ribbons-sing to adoring congregations is to queasily confront the cognitive dissonance of a culture that still too often robs Black girls of their childhoods. Vance, squeezing every ounce of nuance out of a complex role). Parks contrasts that heyday with black-and-white flashbacks to her childhood in ’50s Detroit, when Little Re (newcomer Shaian Jordan, in a devastating performance of stolen innocence) toured the tent-revival circuit, singing gospel alongside her father, the preacher and civil rights hero the Rev.
![genius: aretha cast genius: aretha cast](https://media.cbs19.tv/assets/WXIA/images/86c29473-26fe-436f-bdcf-6cf7c76628e0/86c29473-26fe-436f-bdcf-6cf7c76628e0_1140x641.jpg)
![genius: aretha cast genius: aretha cast](https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/1760868/david-cross-aretha.jpg)
#GENIUS: ARETHA CAST PROFESSIONAL#
We get a sense of how her professional triumphs, personal conflicts and political consciousness progress as she levels up from half-empty clubs to top-tier fame. Rather than cram all 76 of Franklin’s years on earth into one eight-episode season, Aretha concentrates on a roughly two-decade span, beginning in the early ’60s, that encompasses her most creative period. Its sensitive, though not hagiographic, narrative illuminates a superstar with a widely beloved body of work but a poorly understood biography and inner life. Billie Holiday, Aretha is an uneven yet largely thoughtful, gripping and visually stunning portrait of a generational talent.
![genius: aretha cast genius: aretha cast](https://tvseriesfinale.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/genius-s3-aretha-small-e1606526125644.jpg)
Created by Suzan-Lori Parks, the Pulitzer-winning, MacArthur-anointed playwright who scripted the recent film The United States vs.
#GENIUS: ARETHA CAST SERIES#
It is this tension-the push of the subject’s incandescent talent and tireless ambition, and the pull of her complicated past-that animates the third season of National Geographic Channel’s docudrama series Genius and its first to spotlight a woman or person of color. What is a mythical princess but an extraordinary young woman who extracts a happy ending from a story steeped in adversity, family strife, abuse and other psychosexual horrors?
![genius: aretha cast genius: aretha cast](https://hips.hearstapps.com/vidthumb/images/gettyimages-1154863010.jpg)
Yet, her future as the Queen of Soul aside, the fairy-tale metaphor is apt. The reality, at that point in the mid-1960s, is that Franklin is juggling a troubled marriage, a controlling father, a fraught relationship with two sisters who envy her success, and her duties as a 20-something mom of three-the oldest, Clarence, born when Franklin was just 12 and raised as “the family’s baby.” Franklin is struggling amid a racist, sexist industry to become the singular musician she knows she can be. Aretha (played with sparkling intelligence by Cynthia Erivo) is talking with the boundary-busting talent agent Ruth Bowen ( Kimberly Hébert Gregory) about the public image she wants to create. It’s not a statement of fact so much as an act of magical thinking. “I am a princess in a fairy tale,” Aretha Franklin announces in the first episode of Genius: Aretha.