You Want the REAL Aretha? Watch This

Forget the Genius: Aretha biopic series that debuted Sunday night on the National Geographic channel. What a hot mess — and not in a good way. Laughably corny; chopped into head-spinning, back-and-forth flashbacks; dominated by the annoying men in her life (namely father C. L. Franklin and husband Ted White); and starring a British actress (Cynthia Erivo) who pales in comparison to the true Queen of Soul, the Nat Geo series just leaves you yearning for the real deal.

So you need to watch a video to get the awful Genius: Aretha out of your head. The live performance of “I Never Loved a Man” (her greatest song, in my book) — sweaty, sultry sex-drenched — in an Amsterdam concert hall in 1968 is PURE Aretha Franklin. All the rest is pale imitation. For some reason, Square Space won’t allow me to link to it (how square) — but you can find it on YouTube.

A final note on the barrage of TV commercials on Nat Geo programs. They kill any dramatic momentum that the network’s shows begin to build (even shows a lot better than Genius: Aretha). A few years ago, I met with the top executives at Nat Geo to discuss turning one of my books into a docudrama series. An A-list Hollywood director was attached to the project and at our meeting in the cable channel’s New York offices, the deal seemed a certainty. Then the director blew up the meeting with a series of misgivings — chief among them his concern about the commercial interruptions that he feared would sabotage his work. The sure-thing meeting quickly turned into a disaster and Nat Geo nixed the project. At the time, I was furious at the director — he had just torched a half-million dollars that were headed my way. But I’ve since decided he was right. The National Geographic channel is incapable of presenting shows of any real quality. The director was right not to attach his name to a Nat Geo series.

But the real Aretha soars above anything that basic cable can do to her.