When Does Franklin Season 2 Come Out? Is It Renewed?

What is Franklin about?

Franklin arrives as an unlikely prestige drama: a show about one of history's most celebrated figures at a moment when his legend feels oddly distant from popular consciousness. Michael Douglas inhabits Benjamin Franklin not as the grandfatherly face on the hundred-dollar bill, but as a man of appetites and ambitions, sent to France in 1776 as America's diplomatic gambit in a war that could very well be lost. The premise hinges on the tension between Franklin's legendary wit and his desperate circumstances—he's the country's most valuable asset in a game where the stakes couldn't be higher, and where charm and cunning must substitute for military might. It's a show about diplomacy as theater, about how a scientist-turned-strategist learned to navigate the baroque world of European courts when his young nation's survival depended on it.

The eight-episode season moves with the pace of a historical thriller, balancing intimate character work with political intrigue across multiple court settings. It's less a staid PBS period piece and more a calculating drama about power, seduction, and the moral compromises embedded in nation-building. The supporting ensemble—including Noah Jupe as Franklin's grandson, Ludivine Sagnier as the French socialite Madame Brillon, and Thibault de Montalembert as the calculating French foreign minister—creates a pressure cooker of competing interests around Douglas's central figure. The show traffics in the notion that history at this scale is won not just through armies but through relationships, secrets, and the constant negotiation of self-presentation.

Arriving on Apple TV in April 2024, Franklin received modest viewership and mixed critical response, settling at a 6.9 IMDb rating that reflects appreciation for its craftsmanship alongside reservations about pacing or narrative focus. The show found its particular audience among history buffs and those drawn to Douglas's late-career dramatic work, though it didn't break through to the broader cultural conversation that prestige historical dramas typically command.

As a historical drama centered on a founding figure, Franklin occupies an increasingly niche corner of television—earnest, literary, and resolutely old-school in its approach to the period drama form. It neither attempts to radically reframe its subject nor lean into contemporary commentary, instead offering a measured, dignified examination of how one man wielded influence when direct power was unavailable. In an era of genre-hybrid prestige television, its straightforward commitment to historical storytelling and character-driven diplomacy feels quietly out of step with the currents that have reshaped the prestige landscape.

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