A Global One-Man Show

Newspaper, magazine and television journalists relish commemorating, and few media outlets have allowed the occasion of the coming millennium to go uncontemplated. This week ABC weighs in with an homage to the current century. Seven years in the making, the project has cost the network $20 million, marking it as one of the most expensive undertakings in the history of the news division. Shapers of the documentary examined more than 3,000 hours of news footage and conducted hundreds of interviews.

The result of all this effort is The Century, a distillation of the past 874,680 hours into 12, or rather six two-hour programs. They will air at 9 p.m. E.T. over the next two weeks, beginning this Monday and ending on Saturday, April 10. Narrated by Peter Jennings, The Century served as the mother lode from which the anchorman's well-received companion volume of the same name was mined. The book, written with Todd Brewster, is perched on the New York Times best-seller list, 11 slots behind The Greatest Generation, a historical tome by another network-news anchor, Tom Brokaw.

So just what does Jennings' televised history lesson bring to the media's growing centennial curriculum? Press material for The Century implies that it aims to tell the world's story over the past 100 years. That is somewhat misleading. What the documentary does, in fact, is offer a smattering of global drama all in the context of a one-man show--sometimes staid, sometimes engaging--starring Uncle Sam, a character free-thinking, dysfunctional, glorified, triumphant.

Forgoing a predictable chronological narrative, the documentary presents itself thematically. The first segment, grandiloquently titled "Heaven and Earth," spends an hour chronicling Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic, and a second hour examining the era of space exploration. Another segment gives us a picture of America's rebellious spirit through the stories of Martin Luther King Jr. and Elvis Presley. A particularly affecting installment, airing on April 3, depicts America as an imperfect global paterfamilias, and looks at the country's efforts to preserve democracy in the Great War at the beginning of the century and again, ambiguously, in Vietnam later on. Pairing these two especially gruesome entanglements may seem an obvious choice, but the producers avoid the easy parallels between the already well-documented horrors of both wars.

Much of this chapter is devoted to President Woodrow Wilson's steadfast and not entirely popular efforts to keep the U.S. out of the conflict between the Allied and Central Powers. There is nothing new here, but there is value in being reintroduced to an American leader whose every move was not dictated by public whim. This installment, in addition to offering moving reflections from still-living World War I veterans, also features an appearance by Wilson's grandson, the Rev. Francis Sayre. He talks about how his widowed grandfather fell for Edith Galt, a woman he met golfing and to whom he proposed after knowing her for just two months.

Intimate moments like these are rare in The Century, but they truly enrich it. The most striking and evocative images in the series come from home-movie footage of the Los Alamos scientists at rest--here they are seen kicking back, drinking and giggling as though they were any random group of unburdened 26-year-olds.

For the most part, though, the production relies too heavily on a stream of academics, writers and other pundits, mostly male, offering tired facts and not always enlightening insights about the past 10 decades. It is debatable whether a 12-hour examination of modern world history actually requires an entire 60 min. on Elvis. It is iffier still whether anyone watching the segment will benefit from a dour-looking David Halberstam explaining that "the King" was an iconoclast and a "forerunner to youth culture." And while we're on the tricky subject of inclusions and omissions, how did the producers justify an hour on the Iranian hostage crisis and not, say, on the creation of Israel?

What's really missing here is the social history that enlivens Jennings' book--a peek into the ways in which legions of real people who never made it to big-ticket events like wars or treaty signings or space-shuttle launches actually spent their days and nights. Perhaps that's something for the Lifetime channel to take on.