VIDEO

By Richard Zoglin

MAKING SENSE OF THE SIXTIES; PBS; Jan. 21, 22, 23

This decade mania is getting out of hand. Pundits had barely finished figuring out what distinguished the '80s from the '70s (now what was that difference again?) when they set about trying to characterize the '90s, a decade still in diapers: the "get real" decade; the Nervous '90s. How about the Name-Obsessed '90s?

Ah, but the '60s; now there was a decade to reckon with. It had personality and definition; it made an impact. It was the decade of the Beatles and the Kennedys, Vietnam and Kent State, the Generation Gap and the Credibility Gap. Negroes became blacks, and black became beautiful; the campuses exploded; draft cards went up in smoke; and sexual taboos disintegrated. When the '60s ended (sometime early in the '70s), the world -- and we -- had changed.

The very momentousness of its subject, however, is the biggest hurdle facing the six-hour PBS series Making Sense of the Sixties. So many pieces of the story have been told so often, in documentaries from Eyes on the Prize to Berkeley in the '60s, that a curtain of boredom threatens to fall even before the stage is set. Much of the material is distressingly familiar: the expected film clips (Martin Luther King, Woodstock, the Democrats at war in Chicago) annotated with the expected cliches ("The age of heroes was over").

Yet the series pierces the fog of familiarity with a strong sense of direction. A key decision was to focus not on the big events but on the sociological shifts that the decade engendered. The people interviewed are, for the most part, not well-known personalities but articulate ordinary people: campus activists, Vietnam veterans, former hippies, union leaders, teachers, parents. Many of the clips have a grass-roots freshness (a dropout cheerfully concludes an impromptu lecture on the evils of the work ethic by saying, "So we struggle, in our own humble way, to destroy the United States"). And if there are some curious historical lapses (the show recounts the collapse of Lyndon Johnson's presidency without once mentioning Eugene McCarthy), the series makes a respectable stab at fulfilling the promise of its title. The decade does make a little more sense.

The youth rebellion of the '60s, the documentary points out, was a logical reaction against the conformist, prosperity-driven, communism-obsessed '50s. The revolt was especially threatening to Middle America because it went beyond politics and challenged the fundamental values of society. And if it ultimately failed to achieve its more grandiose goals, it left its mark in myriad ways, from college ethnic-studies departments to a new role for women. "Maybe the youth rebellion didn't get what it wanted," the narrator asserts. "But perhaps this generation -- and America -- got what it needed." In a program that utilizes music cannily, the song that accompanies the closing credits is a symbolic summing up: Cat Mother's mellow, rocking version of Side by Side.

Making Sense of the Sixties has its own generational identity: it is the latest in a growing library of historical documentaries, mostly on PBS, that have mined the film, video and photographic archives to chronicle the American experience. The masterpiece was last fall's The Civil War. But other programs have offered definitive TV accounts of everything from the 1929 stock market crash to the life of Cole Porter. Not a bad legacy for the '90s: the Golden Age of the Documentary.