Dial File: Can 'The '60s' convey the '60s?

The hype is hyper: "The Movie Event of a Generation."

But to borrow George Carlin's example of words that don't belong together, the prospect of NBC's "The '60s" seems like "jumbo shrimp": Jumbo topic. Shrimpy significance.

Vietnam. Civil rights. Woodstock. Free love. College protests. Draft-dodging. Bra-burning. King. The Kennedys. Nixon. Seismic societal shifts ... Four hours? (Actually, three hours and change, once the commercial hucksters finish huckstering.) ABC is spending six hours on a Stephen King miniseries.

NBC is distilling a generation's defining decade, in all its tangled tumultuousness, to TV Cliff notes: an era of pride and pain reduced to Sociology Lite.

(Of course, the very notion of this miniseries being commercially sponsored is an ironic kick in the can: "The '60s." Brought to you by The Establishment for the sole materialistic purpose of making money for many of the flower children now power-lunching on Madison Avenue. But I digress.)

Through the eyes of one family, the miniseries (airing Sunday and Monday) views the years 1960-69, even though the '60s zeitgeist could more accurately be pegged from around 1964 -- just following JFK's assassination and the American debut of the Beatles -- through the early '70s and the end of the Vietnam War.

This is a Big Topic. And Big Topics are no longer the forte of network television, where more intimate tales are in vogue. Movies do the thematic heavy lifting now. Glimpsed through the prism of pop culture, the horrors of World War II will echo in "Saving Private Ryan," not "The Winds of War." The Holocaust will reverberate not in "Holocaust," but in "Schindler's List."

And the '60s will cinematically speak louder through the flicks (his paranoia notwithstanding) of Oliver Stone -- "Platoon," "JFK," "Born on the Fourth of July," "The Doors" and "Heaven and Earth" -- than "The '60s." Only "Roots" remains TV's enduring sociological statement -- and that stretched over eight nights.

Over the last three weeks, the '60s seemed to grow cheesier with each nerve-deadening replay of the "'60s" promo. At last viewing, it seemed less an epochal era than, say, "a very special 'Friends' " in which Joey gets a gig in a revival of "Hair."

'Nam and Nixon as Must-See TV. Such is TV's unflagging knack for trivializing much of what it touches without even trying. It's the nature of the medium -- at least on commercial channels -- to stress entertainment over edification.

"The '60s" smacks of a naked attempt to grab a generation, not by its gut but by its demos, and ring ratings out of it with a project doomed to oversimplification. Having advanced from childhood to adolescence in the '60s (I turned 13 the day of the Kent State massacre in 1970) and weathered decades of our cultural obsession with it -- has any other era in modern history been as poked, prodded and drained for Significance and Meaning? -- the idea of this truncated TV treatise seems to me a quaint puppet show.

Tom Hanks took 12 hours to navigate only one '60s scenario -- the space race -- in "From the Earth to the Moon." It was richly rewarding television, rife with insights.

As for the four-hour wrap-up of "The '60s"? I'd settle for finally learning the lyrics to "Louie Louie."

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