NEW ORLEANS DOCU LACKS DEPTH.

Byline: David Kronke

Television Critic

'Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?" Louis Armstrong asked in 1947, a question that took on added resonance in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina left the city on the ropes.

"New Orleans," an "American Experience" documentary airing tonight on KCET, asks the considerably less musical question: Do you know what it means to compress two centuries of a great city's life into two hours? After all, Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke" dedicated four hours to Hurricane Katrina alone.

Ken Burns' "Jazz" devoted more than two hours to the city's musical history. Add to that its unique racial makeup, its unsurpassed cuisine, the French Quarter and its myriad parties and its, uh, eccentric political landscape, and it's clear the city deserves something more akin to Ric Burns' epic "New York" documentary miniseries than a mere two hours.

Still, though the film lazily glosses over wide swatches of the city's culture and color, we'll take what we can get, and "New Orleans," from writer Michelle Ferrari, director/producer Stephen Ives and producer Amanda Pollack and narrated by actor Jeffrey Wright, offers a perhaps appropriately peripatetic portrait of the Crescent City.

Amid the romanticism -- "It's the only city in the world where you can have total unity and absolute diversity existing simultaneously without contradiction," one interviewee observes -- are harsher facts about its hardscrabble history. America's original melting pot -- it once boasted more citizens of mixed ancestry than any other city in the country -- New Orleans has weathered more than its share of civilrights battles, including the Rosa Parks battle a full 50 years before Parks refused to relinquish her bus seat in Montgomery, Ala.: The Supreme Court shot down Homer Plessy, who was seven-eighths white, in his argument against segregation on train cars.

Much racial strife is catalogued here, alongside the requisite thumbnail sketches of playwright Tennessee Williams, who achieved a symbiotic relationship with the city; Armstrong, a native son who eventually scornfully declared, "They treat me better all over the world than they do in my own hometown"; and Ruby Bridges, whose integration into the city's schools unwittingly led to segregation via gentrification.

The botched response to the 1927 Louisiana flood provides plenty of foreboding for Katrina, which is returned to repeatedly throughout the documentary. In its efforts to reach a soft-pedaled conclusion, the film includes uplifting scenes from last year's Jazz Festival's gospel tent but avoids emphasizing the utterly destroyed Ninth Ward or the city's increasing crime rate as it has been overrun by gangs.

And, honestly, given that the film is about New Orleans, the music, though pleasant, could've been much, much better.

David Kronke, [phone]

[e-mail]

NEW ORLEANS - Three stars

What: "American Experience" documentary on one of the country's most colorful -- and devastated -- cities.

Where: KCET.

When: 9 tonight.

In a nutshell: A glib NOLA 101: The city's greatest hits, with an emphasis on race.

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KCET's "New Orleans" compresses the city's history into a scant two hours.