Democracy's Toughest Test

By Richard Zoglin

SHOW: THE GREAT DEPRESSION

TIME: DEBUTING OCT. 25, 9 P.M. (MOST STATIONS), PBS

THE BOTTOM LINE: A common-man chronicle of the '30s is quirky and superb.

What is most impressive about The Great Depression, the new seven-hour documentary series from Eyes on the Prize creator Henry Hampton, is the predictable things it doesn't do. No obligatory, year-by-year chronicle of the economic disaster, replete with awful statistics; the few that are thrown in (the unemployment rate reached 25% in 1933) are awful enough. No windy political-science seminar on the strategies of Roosevelt's New Deal; the emphasis is not on Washington but on the fabric of life in the country, from breadlines and Hoovervilles to race riots and violent labor-management confrontations. Nor, perhaps most refreshingly, is there much nostalgic reveling in the decade's pop culture; despite an occasional movie clip (42nd Street, Dinner at Eight), the series keeps its eye on reality, not on Hollywood fantasy.

That reality is riveting. The Great Depression follows in the formidable tradition of Eyes on the Prize and The Civil War: a painstakingly researched, artfully assembled, scrupulously evenhanded re-creation of a turbulent, defining era in American history. The Depression of the 1930s is a more diffuse and in some ways more difficult subject than either the Civil War or the civil rights movement. But Hampton and his producers have superbly dramatized a period when democracy was tested more severely than perhaps ever before in American history.

The Great Depression has a wonderful ability to seem both definitive and quirky at the same time. Episodes are organized around people and events that, at first glance, seem like mere sideshows: Oklahoma bank robber Charles ("Pretty Boy") Floyd, for instance, or the construction of New York City's Triborough Bridge. Yet each is skillfully woven into the larger picture: the glamourization of lawbreaking as economic hard times hit; New York City as a laboratory for the new relationship between Washington and local government. The people interviewed are not, by and large, major players but ordinary folks -- former sharecroppers, union organizers, journalists, a White House butler. ( PAUL EDWARDS, HOBO, reads one onscreen identification, surely a TV first.)

The common-man focus has its shortcomings. While the series spends ample time detailing the course of race relations during the decade, it pays scant attention to Roosevelt's re-election campaigns and none at all to economics (no mention of deficit spending or John Maynard Keynes). The international scene, for all but the last two segments, is also ignored.

Yet from moment to moment, The Great Depression brims with striking images and insights. If it lacks the poetry of The Civil War or the narrative cohesiveness of Eyes on the Prize, the material seems fresher and has more complex echoes for our own era. The near-miss campaign of socialist Upton Sinclair for Governor of California in 1934, the subject of one full episode, is like an event from prehistoric times; it can't happen here anymore. Yet the account of Hollywood's slick media campaign to defeat him might have come from a 1993 campaign adviser's handbook. The newsreel footage showing police trying to "rout out nests of communists hiding in empty boxcars" seems quaintly dated. Yet the headlines of plant closings and shots of homeless people on the streets look, alas, all too familiar.