As Lin-Manuel Miranda prepares to say goodbye to Broadway's smash-hit musical Hamilton on July 9, George Washington’s right-hand man has turned up in time for the third-season finale of AMC’s Turn: Washington's Spies (Monday, 10 ET/PT).
“I’ve been campaigning for Hamilton since the pilot,” says actor Sean Haggerty, who joined the Revolutionary War spy drama as a stand-in.
AMC isn’t the only network that stands to benefit from a Hamilton-fueled interest in U.S. history. CBS saw its highest Tony ratings in 15 years, thanks in part to the show, which won 11 awards. And on Oct. 21 (9 ET/PT), PBS will kick off its Arts Fall Festival with Hamilton’s America, a 90-minute documentary on the making of the musical. Filmmaker Alex Horowitz followed Miranda from the research and writing stages to Broadway, as well as showing Hamilton's impact on the government (it's credited with helping keep the nation's first Treasury secretary on the $10 bill), education and pop culture.
"You're going to learn the historical context for a particular time in Hamilton's life, then you’ll see Lin's creative process for turning it into musical theater, and ultimately, you'll see the scene play itself out," explains Great Performances executive producer David Horn, who oversaw the film for PBS. "Whether you've seen the show or not, you're going to get a lot more insight."
Nor is TV the only medium getting a bump from the play. Its source material, Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton, has shipped more than a million copies, and just made it back to No. 8 on USA TODAY’s best-selling books list. Hamilton: The Revolution, a behind-the-scenes book about the musical, debuted at No. 1 in April and has 500,000 copies in circulation.
Haggerty had also read Chernow’s book before playing Hamilton in a 2013 short film for the National Parks Service. “Once I started unveiling this character, I had the same burning desire to tell that story. When Turn came along, I said, ‘This must be destiny.”
The show's executive producer, Craig Silverstein, never planned to include Hamilton, but Haggerty won him over in a way that would make the Founding Father proud. He wrote a scene between the aide-de-camp and intelligence officer Benjamin Tallmadge (Seth Numrich), who ran the spy network known as the Culper Ring. With the help of Numrich and the crew, he shot it during a lunch break and gave it to Silverstein on a flash drive.
“When I watched it, I was shocked,” Silverstein says. “I assumed it would be a scene they shot in Sean’s apartment. But it was on our set, fully lit, in costume, in wigs. And there was Hamilton! He really went the extra mile.”
Silverstein planned to end Season 3 with the 1780 defection of Benedict Arnold (Owain Yeoman) 
to the British, so the timing was perfect. “I knew Hamilton was at West Point so it was our way to give a nod to him without doing the Hamilton show, which has already been done by Lin,” he explains.
But luckily for Turn, Miranda' work omits Arnold’s storyline as well as the capture of his British handler, Major John André (JJ Feild), leaving them some juicy material. Silverstein explains, “Since we knew we were going to do a trial and Hamilton was a lawyer, we decided to have him speak for André.”
"We're seeing the crossover (between Hamilton and Turn) start to happen," Haggerty says.
It's happening offscreen, too. “I met (Ian Kahn), who plays Washington,” Miranda tells USA TODAY. “He and Chris Jackson (his Hamilton counterpart) were in the corner for hours after the show, just talking shop about Washington, which was pretty cool to see.”
Contributing: Elysa Gardner, Jocelyn McClurg
