There’s Lots of Polyester in ‘The ‘70s’

One has to admire fierce determination. NBC’s bold, tenacious crusade to reduce contemporary U.S. history to a music video continues with a new two-parter, “The ‘70s,” whose title describes not only its subject but its IQ.

“The ‘70s” is an uninteresting story about uninteresting characters played by uninteresting actors. Otherwise . . . enjoy.

It exists only because its idiot predecessor, “The ‘60s,” somehow attracted an enormous audience--the way a freeway crash draws a crowd--when it aired during the February ratings sweeps of 1999.

Now comes this year’s May ratings period. And amazingly, “The ‘70s” manages to be even more banal than “The ‘60s,” gathering stereotypes like cobwebs while slinging slogans and trivializing a chapter of Americana that was book-ended on one side by the slaying of four Kent State students by Ohio National Guardsmen and on the other side by the Iranian hostage crisis that sowed the seeds of Jimmy Carter’s demise as president.

Directed by Peter Werner, “The ‘70s” closely follows its predecessor’s formulaic blueprint.

Werner accurately calls this “MTV meets the History Channel.” Like “The ‘60s,” this new story mingles period music and young fictional characters whose intersecting tumultuous lives are intercut with actual news footage in a futile attempt to give their individual sagas credibility.

Like “The ‘60s,” it wags its finger at fat, impossible-to-miss targets. Try racism, sexism and Richard Nixonism. And of course, the two decades were straddled by the Vietnam War.

Like “The ‘60s,” the attitude here is that the decade belonged entirely to the very young, with everyone older than 30 observing from a rocking chair or musty attic. In this miniseries, the “older” woman who briefly seduces the young hero is about 24.

Also like “The ‘60s,” this is a miniseries that, when all else fails, you can snap your fingers and dance to. In fact, the companion release of the soundtrack on CD promises to be much more rewarding than the story.

“The ‘70s” opens on the Kent State campus as antiwar demonstrations are breaking out, and where siblings Byron and Christie Shales (Brad Rowe and Amy Smart) and their friends, Eileen Wells (Vinessa Shaw) and Dexter Johnson (Guy Torry), are bridges about to cross 10 years of troubled waters.

The script by Mitch Brian and Kevin Willmott from a story by Jeffrey Fiskin defines these polyester caricatures narrowly by the most obvious signposts of the times, from Watergate to “black power,” as if Americans who lived through this period as adults were all at the epicenter of social and political upheaval and gave little thought to the ordinary routine of life.

Don’t expect subtlety or shades of gray, for these characters are set in stone from the moment you meet them and their bell-bottoms.

Everyone here is assigned one “ism.” For Eileen, helped by her “sisters” at Barnard to overcome her natural passivity, it’s a comical brand of banner-waving feminism that distorts the seriousness of the actual movement and makes it easy to ridicule. For Dexter, an African American, it’s angry black powerism. For Christie, disillusioned by the New York modeling scene, it’s the last-resort haven of cultism.

And for Byron, whose hair mysteriously does not move until the middle of Part 2, it’s the rock-ribbed Republicanism he inherited from his rich, sniffy and naturally rigidly narrow-minded parents.

Byron wears this straitjacket en route to Watergate, becoming a sort of Donald Segretti saboteur and dirty trickster who works for Nixon’s reelection committee, infiltrating the Democrats and providing a diagram for the GOP burglars to follow when they break into the offices of the Democratic National Committee.

Wearing his second thoughts like a truss, he hits a fatuous low when testifying before the Watergate Committee and later becoming a yuppie dropout who communes with nature and finds his inner goodness in the great Northwest.

Meanwhile, Eileen and her feminist sisters learn just how insidious corporate maledom can be, Dexter finds his Afro and identity in Los Angeles, and fast-living Christie, after snorting coke with her record producer boyfriend the way this story ingests cliches, has one epiphany after another.

You just know that after a decade of side roads, these four noble spirits in progress will be converging on the same halo.

Just as NBC programmers likely will be converging on something called “The ‘80s” in 2001.

What “The ‘70s” fails to provide is a sense of the times beyond the platitudes and sloganeering of its simpleton, hackneyed characters. It has no style, no wit, no texture. And in these four hours, not a bumper sticker’s worth of substance.

* Part 1 of “The ‘70s” can be seen on NBC Sunday at 9 p.m. It concludes Monday. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. A special Perspective piece will appear in Sunday’s Calendar. He can be contacted by e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.