Whence the hate?

He’s a weird cherub with an odd little face at age 10, obviously quite disturbed. Later he acquires a demented teen sneer, much like Elvis’ lip curl, before decades of scheming, ranting, erupting like a volcano, savaging Jews, seducing the upper classes, energizing beer hall rowdies and deploying brownshirt bullies as foreplay for World War II.

So this was Adolf Hitler.

“Hitler: The Rise of Evil” is neither as awful as some of its critics maintain nor as good or profound as CBS and its Alliance Atlantis producers promised while gingerly guiding this crippled two-part project through minefields of suspicion and anger, leading to a metamorphosis worthy of Kafka.

When the dust settled months ago, the story’s course had veered sharply, making a casualty of original screenwriter G. Ross Parker, who was booted after his first draft was blasted as soft on Hitler. Another casualty, much later, was executive producer Ed Gernon, fired by Canadian company Alliance Atlantis in a cowardly act bearing the DNA of CBS, after he was attacked for publicly suggesting a connection between the fear and acquiescence in Germany that boosted Hitler and the climate in the U.S. propelling an invasion of Iraq.

The patriotism police’s outrage shook Gernon’s bosses. When he was lambasted as disloyal by a storm trooper writing in the New York Post, the smear was in and deemed bad for business. And business (as Gernon’s subsequent near-erasure from an otherwise expansive network press kit affirms) is what CBS and “The Rise of Evil” are essentially about, platitudes aside.

Shot mostly in Prague under French Canadian director Christian Duguay, it’s fine looking and atmospheric thanks largely to Pierre Gill’s camera work and Marek Dobrowolski’s production design. And very arresting, too, even when struggling to decode the intricate politics that Hitler bends to his advantage. This is anything but a tedious history lecture.

Yet what a missed opportunity, for instead of showing Hitler’s evolution from early childhood as originally planned -- a concept some Jews loudly prejudged as inherently anti-Semitic but one that would have broken important ground on film -- the story is stunted by focusing mainly on his serpentine journey to power.

It’s a worthy approach but one lacking the scope and dimension of what was first envisioned for this historical flashback, before protesters spooked the Chicken Littles at CBS and before Parker’s draft, based on a praised new Hitler biography by scholar Ian Kershaw, was put to the flame like books on a bonfire.

Although pint-sized for the role, that good actor Robert Carlyle is the commanding, seething, ominously glowering force you’d expect from history’s arch villain. But Carlyle is barred from probing beneath this surface by a script mostly from John Pielmeier (who replaced Parker) that supposes that Hitler had no major shaping influences, that he began life as a monster and his humanity got snipped when his umbilical cord did. If he was no more than a sociopathic force of nature heeding only twisted inner voices from infancy, as this account implies, there’s nothing to be gained from more than a token glance at his formative years, nor much to explore.

Except why gates swung open, one at a time, to clear his path to leadership.

What it takes for Hitler to flourish here is his own shrewdness and a defeated people at once intimidated by him and welcoming at a time of social crisis: Meet Germany, its economy in tatters, its resentment high, its callow democracy and aging leadership buckling under the tonnage of a harsh peace treaty prescribed by the victors of World War I. Just the ticket was a charismatic screamer bearing handy scapegoats, a blueprint for glory and a brutal enforcer in Ernst Rohm (Peter Stormare) and his SA gang.

“The Rise of Evil” evokes philosopher Edmund Burke’s observation about evil prevailing when good men do nothing. But it fails to fulfill its promise to demonstrate that Hitler could have been stopped, at any point in his pirouette on the head of a pin, if reasonable Germans had said no to him instead of capitulating.

He does receive a light sentence after his failed 1923 rebellion in Munich, and is treated royally inside Landsberg prison, where he is able to write “Mein Kampf.” But an early champion, publisher Ernst Hanfstaengl (Liev Schreiber), ultimately becomes disillusioned. And the story’s crescendoing moral voice is someone who resists this wave of adulation and awe with passion. He’s Fritz Gerlich (Matthew Modine), a prominent German journalist who crusades against Hitler without bringing him down, and who pays dearly for the effort.

By 1934, when “The Rise of Evil” ends, Austrian-born Hitler is nearly in control, only a few Sieg Heils from dominating most of Europe and imposing death camps on millions.

The story tells viewers about that grim outcome instead of showing it, concluding with a somber graphic noting Hitler’s macabre legacy of human wreckage. That’s fine in this case. If most Americans aren’t aware by now of what ensued in Europe from the mid-1930s on, they’re living out their own faux “reality” show while ignoring history books, a spate of theatrical movies on the topic and the crush of Jewish Holocaust dramas and documentaries that appear annually on TV.

What they’ll want to know but won’t learn here, though -- because it’s fuzzy -- is the source of Hitler’s hatred of Jews. Perhaps he was born with that too?

His mother (Stockard Channing) mentions Jews fleetingly to young Adolf, and later he hears someone briefly vilify them. Then suddenly it’s 1914, and he’s inexplicably blaming “the Jews, the Jews” for his failure as an artist, an anti-Semitic tirade he intensifies during the war as a corporal in the German army en route to making this his political centerpiece.

Murky as well is Hitler’s exotic sexual behavior, from the play he makes for Hanfstaengl’s American-born wife (Julianna Margulies) to his obsession with his half-sister’s nymphet daughter, Geli Raubal (Jena Malone), to his pairing off with Eva Braun (Zoe Telford), played here as a hussy with an attitude. When a petulant Eva snaps at Geli’s mother, “I want you gone from this house by morning,” you suspect you’ve departed Germany for the la-la land of Hollywood fantasy. As you do when young Eva brashly interrupts a party meeting to defend Hitler from attacks by rivals.

While it may be true, moreover, that Hanfstaengl counseled Hitler on acquiring that distinctive clipped-mustache look (“When you think of Lenin you think of beard and bald”), hearing it here recalls a tongue-in-cheek HBO movie that had famed fight promoter Don King with ordinary hair until a friend comically invented his spectacular coif. The King story was not meant to be taken seriously. “The Rise of Evil” is.

It earns some respect, but it isn’t nearly the insightful Hitler primer it could have been or should have been.

*

‘Hitler: The Rise of Evil’

Where: CBS

When: 9-11 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday

Production Credits: Directed by Christian Duguay; written by John Pielmeier and G. Ross Parker; produced by John Ryan; executive produced by Peter Sussman and Ed Gernon

Robert Carlyle...Adolf Hitler

Jena Malone...Geli Raubal

Julianna Margulies...Helene Hanfstaengl

Liev Schreiber...Ernst Hanfstaengl

Matthew Modine...Fritz Gerlich

Peter Stormare...Ernst Rohm

Peter O’Toole...President Hindenburg

Rating: The network has rated Part 1 (Sunday) TV-14LV (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for coarse language and violence) and Part 2 (Tuesday) TV-14V (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with advisory for violence).