‘Genius’ Isn’t Your Parents’ National Geographic

The scene begins in the 1920s with a chauffeured automobile, the driver having picked up a well-dressed man who kisses his hand to the mezuzah outside his door before entering the car. Inside he reads a paper, the Star of David vaguely, nonetheless noticeably, atop the front page. He appears an educated man. A businessman, or a professor perhaps, his mustache and goatee groomed, the sides of his cropped white hair seen only on the sides under a bowler hat. He and his chauffeur drive in a silence familiar to both. A second car swerves in front of them, two men get out speaking angrily in German, and before the chauffeur can drive them from harm’s way he’s shot in the head. The well-dressed man falls to his stomach on the back seat and opens the back door to flee for his life before the second Nazi unloads a machine gun into his face. [quote_right]It takes little imagination for such a quote from Einstein’s colleague to sound familiar from 2016.[/quote_right]This is how National Geographic’s Genius begins, its continued foray into premiere TV following its previous short series Mars and its less-than-subtle insistence that it too can produce high-quality dramatic TV. The company, now majority-owned by 21st Century Fox, is taking a different road than that of its peer networks The History Channel and Discovery when they were bought out – no Pawnography or Naked and Afraid, at least not yet – but instead trying straight for Vikings-style historical fiction, a mesh of prime-time d…