‘The ‘60s’ as Sing-Along

Hey, far out.

On Sunday and Monday NBC tries mingling cultural history with entertainment in a two-part drama recalling a challenging decade when Americans faced the turbulence of Vietnam, political upheaval, civil rights strife and unthinkable murders of national leaders.

If you thought the ‘60s were excruciating, try sitting through the miniseries.

Wall-to-wall with pop and protest hits from that era, “The ‘60s” is infinitely easier to dance to than watch. The songs are a seductive marquee designed to render any audience pensive and misty-eyed. Yet their predominance here is oddly romanticizing and creates a false impression that the era was defined by its music--as if the ‘60s were Woodstock with a back story--instead of vice versa.

In fact, there was more insight into this decade in initial seasons of ABC’s profoundly wise and funny comedy “The Wonder Years” than exists in “The ‘60s,” a music video sing-along supported by narrowly skewed fictional characters whose lives are intercut with actual news footage in an attempt to give their stories the cover of authenticity.

Buckling under the tonnage of its own grandiosity, “The ‘60s” resonates an old-fashioned Hollywood liberalism that feels warm, cozy and especially smug about its fat targets and its finger-wagging at them: Racism, war, assassinations, the counterculture and badness are bad. Oops, they omitted cancer.

“The ‘60s” has the trappings of social commentary and rebellion without the heart or passion. It hasn’t the courage even of its own characters’ convictions. It is too gutless to sustain their anger, concluding its four hours with a tidy, all-pleasing rapprochement as if the decade were enclosed by a Berlin Wall that blocked deeply felt beliefs, emotions and antagonisms from emigrating to the ‘70s.

Get ready for loud oompahs, nonetheless, for this sucker has Cosmic Event engraved all over it. So much so that NBC Enterprises and Mercury Records/Polygram TV have just released a companion soundtrack to help you relive the era that “The ‘60s” depicts with dubious selectivity.

Here’s some advice: Skip the show, buy the CD.

The script by Bill Couturie, Robert Greenfield and Jeffrey Fiskin is a sort of history-skimming “Forrest Gump” without Forrest but with his IQ. It draws primarily from the white middle-class perspective of the Herlihys, a Chicago family whose three kids conveniently evolve into an each-of-a-kind demography of ‘60s politics and social movements: One is off to Nam, another joins the civil rights and antiwar crowds and the third becomes a hippie in Haight-Ashbury. This entitles them collectively to a full panoply of cliches that “The ‘60s” and director Mark Piznarski launch with the ferocity of the Tet offensive.

Trusting no character over 30, the story relegates their parents to mainly background Muzak whose low hum cannot compete with Bob Dylan wailing, “How do you feeeeeel!?” The attitude here seems to be that the ‘60s belonged entirely to the young, that much of the nation was stoned and that nearly everyone else was either off getting assassinated or on a coffee break that lasted a decade.

The pepper in this annoying stew is a black family whose members show up occasionally, but as equally unpersuasive caricatures who beg not to be taken seriously in a miniseries that drops stereotypes like its hippies do acid.

All of these works-in-progress--Marine Brian Herlihy (Jerry O’Connell), student protester Michael Herlihy (Josh Hamilton) and their renegade little sister, Katie (Julia Stiles), as well as black Mississippian Emmet Taylor (Leonard Roberts)--exist primarily as facilitators for the music. Each crisis that touches them, whether Michael joining Mississippi’s Freedom Riders or Emmet having a seminal moment during the Watts riots, produces a companion song or medley available for purchase.

Television too rarely lives up to the role it has taken for itself as the nation’s pop historian. And much like newscasts, “The ‘60s,” too, creates distortion by juxtaposing events in ways that render them equal, as in ticking off the Dallas murder of President Kennedy and U.S. invasion by the Beatles one after the other as if flipping pages in a scrapbook.

The overall credibility level here is low, the fleeting Vietnam action especially hokey, and the overcooking of some borrowed scenes as memorable as the twist. When Michael (a role Hamilton is too mature to play) defuses a confrontation with National Guardsmen by placing a flower in a soldier’s rifle barrel, for example, you feel you’re the one having a bad LSD trip.

The only cast member who blossoms is Stiles, whose Katie loses her virginity to a rock musician between sets and manages later to rise above the banality of her victimhood. Stiles is clearly a young actress to watch.

Which is more than can be said about the rest of this musicale, which ends in a crescendo of epiphanies that conveniently frees everyone of angst just before the closing credits, affirming that it’s easier to change the world than television.