TV Review : Plimpton Adds a Spark to ‘Fireworks!’

A two-hour show on fireworks? Fireworks shows don’t even go on for two hours, so the A&E; Channel’s “Fireworks! With George Plimpton” must be something special.

It is, for awhile, as Plimpton pumps us full of his enthusiasm for pyrotechnics (yes, another enthusiasm to add to this author’s long list of hobby horses). In this program, Plimpton’s patrician self is yanked back to his childhood, when the first words he recalls reading were on a fireworks container: “Light and Get Away.”

He also conveys a great affection for the Italian American Grucci family, a multigenerational clan of fireworking masters based in Long Island who have lived through come-from-behind victories in international fireworks competitions as well as the loss of family members in explosive accidents.

The Gruccis are not part of a corporate-style operation like France’s ultra-high-tech Ruggieri firm; this close family resembles one of those vagabonding circus trapeze families, delighting audiences while putting themselves at great danger.

Once “Fireworks!” goes beyond this human factor, it becomes a messy, scattershot affair jumping around from pyrotechnics through European history, to towns in Mexico and India built on the fireworks industry, to samples of various nighttime spectacles around the world. This last is the most fun, with glimpses of celebrations and shows in Seville (involving holographs), Montreal, the Brooklyn Bridge, China and, perhaps most spectacularly, Japan. The glimpses are often too short, as if too long a look at the “split comets,” “willows,” “chrysanthemums,” “tiger tails” and “palm trees” would amount to boring television.

* “Fireworks! With George Plimpton” airs 9 p.m. Sunday on A&E.;