Review: In the enjoyable 'Franklin,' Michael Douglas plays a flirtatious founding father

Michael Douglas, star of "Romancing the Stone," "Fatal Attraction," "The American President" and so much more, is not the actor one would think of as first in line to play portly, balding man on the money Benjamin Franklin, but he has nevertheless done just that.

In the very enjoyable if not always convincing "Franklin," which premieres Friday on Apple TV+ and follows the founding father through seven of the nine years he spent in Paris, crafting an alliance with the French and negotiating a peace treaty with the British, he's neither portly nor balding, but something of a hunk. Franklin's notoriety in France has been regularly compared to that of a "rock star," at least since that was a term, and though Douglas, 79, is technically