Camillo Sbarbaro once said: “Human race defends itself from geniuses by denying them and it gets rid of them by acknowledging them”. He emphasised that the world actually doesn’t love exceptional people, even if it apparently does; it worships and flatters them, but always with the unspoken and maybe unaware intention of neutralising them, of using them as reassuring and comforting paradigms; they trivialise them through functional and easily digestible formulae.
Among the funniest and most educational television methods to get rid of them, there’s definitely Genius, the audience record-breaking show on National Geographic, which this year is focused on Albert Einstein. A portrayal made of light and shadow, in which the great German-Jewish scientist (whose bigmouth poster is the perfect representation of the genius trivialised into an icon) is told through his processional successes, but also through his difficult family relationships, from his children to his two wives and the several women he had an affair with.
Masterfully played by Geoffrey Rush and broadcast on National Geographic (on Sky channel 403) between May and July, Genius: Einstein registered an average of 363 thousand viewers per week and a total amount of almost 2 million hits.
The next season, whose shooting starts at the end of 2017 and it will be aired in 2018 on the National Geographic channels of 171 countries, will be focused on another giant of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso, and will still be produced by Ron Howard.
