Mythology Mixes With History in a Bold TV Series About Presley

The concept itself is pretty bold. A weekly, half-hour dramatic series about Elvis Presley. In fact, there has never been a weekly television series based on a contemporary real-life character.

But in March, ABC will introduce “Elvis,” starring Michael St. Gerard, with Priscilla Presley as an executive producer.

ABC showed an episode of the series to critics recently, and the show is one of the most culturally fascinating pieces of television created in some time.

The episode opens in Tupelo, Miss., in 1940. We see a young boy with big eyes looking up at a menacing sky. A storm’s brewing. But it’s more than a storm. It is the gods speaking.

And then we see the boy’s mother run out of their humble house to scoop him up in her arms and take him into a cellar where the two of them are going to ride out the storm in the dark, dank underground. More myth and symbolism.

After this visual epigram, we’re in Memphis, 1954, and Elvis is in the studios of Sun Records with Mr. (he’s always called mister here) Sam Phillips, who is producing an Elvis recording session.

We all know the story. Elvis is singing some drippy song, and Mr. Phillips is bummed. Mr. Phillips tells Elvis to take a break. Scotty and Bill, the guitar and bass players, tell “E” (that’s what some in the inner circle called Elvis) to cut loose and play his real music. And Elvis starts singing Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s All Right, Mama.”

Mr. Phillips hears it, runs back into the control room, turns on the recording machine and the rest is history.

It doesn’t matter that we’ve seen so many versions of this scene that we know not only what’s going to happen but also what the main players are going to say before they speak.

In fact, that’s the point. That’s part of what makes it real mythology.

The myth here is a blue-collar one. The rest of the preview episode shows Elvis struggling at his job loading trucks at Crown Electric in Memphis and studying for the electrician’s exam in a delivery truck parked outside a nightclub on Beale Street.

All this happens before Mr. Phillips gets Elvis’ record played on WHBQ radio and everyone in Memphis starts hearing the name Elvis Presley.

St. Gerard mainly sat at the critic’s press conference looking a lot like the young Elvis. Occasionally, he said things like, “I just hope I’m doing justice to Elvis’ genius.” It seemed to be what is called practiced humility.

The first season will deal only with Elvis in the early 1950s. “This has always been my favorite period of Elvis,” said co-producer Jerry Schilling. “This was Elvis as Marlon Brando and James Dean. . . .”