(Thursdays, 10:30 p.m.) is still finding itself, but it’s worth watching because it looks like nothing else on TV.
An adaptation of the long-running and very popular NPR radio series of the same name, it resembles a weekly Errol Morris film, split into smaller segments and handily capped off within 30 minutes. The series uses of archival footage, filmed interviews and staged recreations to tell stories of real people living real lives in the United States. The radio series is more vivid in its storytelling, and more inclined to offer longer, shaggier narratives with ambiguous motivations and no pat resolutions; but the TV version has already found a distinctive look that hints at depths its directors and editors are still learning to plumb.
In particular, one segment profiles a Mormon painter who gathers suitable human subjects to appear in his depictions of Biblical scenes; the image of him constructing a tableaux is strikingly lit and composed. The moments when the storytelling rises to equal the visuals hint at where could (and hopefully will) go. The first episode -- featuring the stories of a farmer who clones his favorite bull only to find the clone is nothing like his old bull, and an improv group that unites to give a minor-league band its best show ever -- push too hard for profundity.
In the first segment, host Ira Glass -- creator and narrator of the NPR show -- seems to keep trying to force the farmer to admit that his new bull is nothing like his old one; it's as if he's pushing for the kind of neat wrapup that his radio series avoids. But by the time the episode about the Mormon painter rolls around, the series seems to have given itself permission to enter all of the messy complications of the real lives it purports to chronicle. The painter hopes that by turning these people into religious figures, they may become closer to God, even if that's not what they want (other people in the subjects' lives feel differently).
The story starts in a simple place, but grows into a more intriguing account of how hard it is to leave a life of faith and then try to reconnect with it later. Just as Halo sold Xboxes and sold DVD players, the Discovery Channel’s rebroadcast of the BBC’s (Sundays, 8 p.m.
) is going to sell HDTV sets. On a regular TV set, the series is a handsomely shot nature documentary, full of interesting new images of animal behavior, but not substantially different from something you might see on PBS or in a National Geographic special. In HD, though, the series is a hypnotizing eye-popper -- the sort of thing you wish a dedicated channel would run 24/7, so you could turn it on and veg out to it.
If the series has a flaw, it’s that it’s deeply self-congratulatory. Much of the filming was accomplished with HD cameras that didn’t exist even a decade ago, and the narration (by Sigourney Weaver) is only too happy to remind us of this, as well as the fact that many of the things being seen here have been captured on camera for the first time. But as annoying as Weaver's narration is, it doesn't damage the series.
(Thursdays, 10:30 p.m.) is still finding itself, but it’s worth watching because it looks like nothing else on TV.
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