A Quality ‘Education’ on CBS

It’s a healthy sign when a series as deeply intelligent and entertaining as “The Education of Max Bickford” gets on the air.

If the CBS premiere is no fluke, this is one of TV’s true quality dramas, arrogant and cranky history professor Bickford striking a different note entirely from the sacrificing high school music teacher Richard Dreyfuss played in the fuzzy “Mr. Holland’s Opus.”

Max’s students at the all-women’s Chadwick College bring him no joy, his strong-willed 18-year-old daughter (Katee Sackhoff) wants little part of him and his male best friend, Steve, is now a woman named Erica (Helen Shaver).

Really setting him off, though, is losing out on a prestigious faculty position he thought was in the bag. He’s quietly angry before exploding, devastated that the coveted spot is going to his former student, Andrea Haskell (Marcia Gay Harden).

Max: “My life is so ... “ He stops, too upset to finish the sentence. When lamenting, “There is no connection, I am no longer relevant,” Max is speaking for other grayheads of his generation who feel out of step with the new millennium’s mainstream.

He’s been teaching the same three courses for 20 years, his friend, Chadwick President Judith Hackett Bryant (Regina Taylor), reminds him. “A lot of history has happened since the Vietnam War, Max.” You taste a bit of the competitive academe jungle here. The opening hour ripples also with easy humor and warmth, some of it between single parent Max and his 11-year-old son (Eric Ian Goldberg), some between recovering alcoholic Max and his AA sponsor, who happens also to be his auto mechanic.

The premiere doesn’t play Erica for outright laughs. Instead, there’s delicate chemistry between her and Max, his fidgety discomfort obvious despite his support of her sex change. In addition, his seething resentment of Andrea pays rewardingly, their angry words lighting a combustible energy. He calls her stress of pop culture “an academic sellout,” she ridicules his courses about “dead white guys.”

What nice work all around. There’s no sense of Dreyfuss acting. He, Harden, Shaver and Taylor are the equal of any cast in television, and this campus drama potentially the equal of any network series.

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“The Education of Max Bickford” can be seen Sundays at 8 p.m. on CBS. The network has rated it TV-PG-L (may be unsuitable for young children, with an advisory for coarse language).