Patriarchs

The Asset team is releasing a 6-part audio drama Patriarchs. As the United States approaches 250 years of independence, the nation is asking hard questions about how it began, who paid the price, and what kind of republic it has become. Patriarchs, a loaded but apt term in today’s vernacular, is a six-episode historical podcast drama that answers those questions by chronicling the most consequential relationship in early America: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, told in their own words.

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We begin with two former presidents looking back over a life together as friends, rivals, and uneasy family. From there, listeners travel back to the moment these strangers first step outside the Continental Congress to talk, two lawyers, two farmers, two men who have no idea they are about to remake the world.

Every scene, every argument, every confession in Patriarchs is drawn from real letters, speeches, and memoirs, voiced by an ensemble of award-‑winning actors—with Stacy Keach starring as Thomas Jefferson. The result is an intimate drama of brilliant founders who are also flawed fathers, husbands, slaveholders, and partisans. ​

We hear their partnership forged in crisis, as they push Congress toward independence and wrestle the language of the Declaration onto the page.​ Alongside them is Abigail Adams, one of the sharpest political minds of the age, whose letters slice cleanly through ego and ideology.

Patriarchs also confronts the reality of slavery and sexual exploitation in the founding generation, centering Sally Hemings not as rumor but as a speaking, thinking presence whose choices and constraints shape Jefferson’s life.

Patriarchs is a chance to hear the founding generation as they really sounded: insecure, vain, idealistic, petty, courageous, haunted—often in the same breath in a rare combination of rigorous primary-source history and bingeable character drama, led by Stacy Keach and a veteran cast capable of carrying both prestige storytelling and wide audience appeal.

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