TRUE CONFESSIONS : Fifteen years of 'Biography'.

The A&E television series "Biography," now in its fifteenth year, has become a many-tentacled phenomenon. There are Biography magazine, a line of books, a Web site, videos, and even a cable channel. The last seems redundant since A&E itself tends to be the "Biography" channel. And with its substantial backlist, the show has been able to perfect the art of recycling. Though any given episode on any given night may be a repeat, "'Biography' Week" is always new. An hour dealing with, say, Al Capone, previously broadcast during "'Biography' Mobster Week," may reappear during "'Biography' American Dreamer Week." In the new pantheon, his celebrity neighbors are no longer gangsters but, perhaps, F. Scott Fitzgerald (dreaming with words, not bullets), Flo Ziegfield (dreaming of chorus girls and moveable staircases), and two other dreamers.

But how good are the individual shows? The blunt answer: if the subject has been dead for more than a century and a half, the show is probably going to be a dud. The closer the subject's birthdate is to the mid-twentieth century and the more he or she has attracted the attention of cameras and microphones, the better the chances that this particular episode will be absorbing. Disraeli trumps Cleopatra because Disraeli was photographed; Edward VII trumps Disraeli because the king got photographed by movie cameras; Edward VIII trumps Edward VII because the later king was not only photographed but sound recorded; Churchill outdoes any king because he knew how to pose for the movie camera and shade his voice for the microphone; and Madonna trumps Winston because she knows as much about media as he did, and is sexy, too.

But does the actual content of the life count for nothing? "Biography" scriptwriters churn out copy that is always simple, straightforward, and unrelievedly vanilla. A high school senior's term paper might contain more idiosyncrasy. But if, while listening to all this bland unfolding, you're also watching interesting film footage, the narration can no more sink the show than a droning tour guide can sabotage the spaciousness of the Grand Canyon.

In truth, it is not so much the wording of the "Biography" scripts that annoys but their standardized structure, a narrative procrustean bed on which the lives of the famous are sometimes stretched, sometimes shortened, but always neatly chopped into five equal portions.

Act I: "It was 1935, the height of the Great Depression when a young married couple, the Presleys..." The birth of our hero, a skimming of childhood with highlights of the usual traumas (young James Garner almost strangling his stepmother, the teenaged Billie Holiday arrested for prostitution). Then a career, the focus for all that crazy energy, is stumbled on and..."little did anyone in the talent agency know that the gawky young talent so in need of polishing would soon be burning up the world." Commercial break.

Act II: A big initial hit paves the way for even bigger endeavors. "Marlon Brando had conquered Broadway. Now he was heading for much richer but riskier dealmaking in the City of the Angels." Commercial.

Act III: Mounting success until two paths diverge in a thorny wood and which will our hero take? "And now Marilyn was about to meet her most challenging assignment yet and in a role that might strip all her defenses away." Commercial.

Act IV: The crisis brings ultimate triumph or the beginning of a downward slide. Mussolini teams up with Hitler. Billie Holiday goes back to drugs. James Garner decides to make the "Rockford Files." Saint Peter finds the answer to Quo Vadis? And as a result of this triumph or catastrophe...

Act V: The End. Miserable or peaceful declining years for the deceased subjects and, for those still living, thumbs-up testimonials from friends and retainers: "Gary Busey is off drugs now for good. I've never seen him more determined to clean up his act and..." Closing summary from host Harry Smith. And a few more commercials.

This sort of architecture serves the lives of men and women of action (including and especially show-biz celebrities) better than those lives consumed by hours in libraries or laboratories. Only if an artist or scientist had an adventurous life is he or she grist for the "Biography" mill. Hemingway, si! Proust, mais non! ("As he gazed at the cork-lined walls of his study, Marcel realized that A la Recherche needed just one more volume." Commercial!), but even certain entertainers don't fit the cliffhanging formula. Billie Holiday's life, whatever the greatness of her artistry, was such an unimpeded slide into addiction and early death that, no matter when the commercials came, suspense was never an option.

Still, content does transform structure. Rock Hudson, that great plodding stiff among Hollywood hunks, provided the series with one of its most boring hours, aired shortly after his death. His life seemed to be that of a show-biz saint until it was inexplicably cut short by aids. To their credit, the producers soon scrapped this hagiography and did a substantially different show, a compassionate, poignant, and even harrowing account of an interesting homosexual man who had to lead a Jekyll-Hyde existence to preserve his career.

In fact, the best celebrity episodes have often been the ones that treat their subjects not only as individuals but as cultural forces. I found the two-hour Rat Pack installment absorbing as a depiction of Kennedy-era macho glamour that touched on an amazing number of issues of that period: the mutual influence of Washington and Hollywood, Playboy-style sexuality, Catholicism in presidential politics, the civil rights struggle, the Mafia. The shows about Bob Dylan and the Beatles had the same fascinating multifariousness. And "Biography" occasionally achieves a coup in European cultural territory, as in the superb three-hour group biography on the Impressionists. Using Monet as the linchpin, it succeeded as history, art history, art criticism, and as good storytelling. Never cheaply popularizing, never sentimental, it showed the painters in the process of groping toward their artistic mission through day-to-day work, failures, self-criticism, and experimentation. These were geniuses too busy and self-doubting to think of themselves as geniuses. This was greatness without the shell of academic formulation.

But for other shows about the monumentally great--Caesar, Washington, Mozart--academics have often been rounded up for sound bites that hardly needed their expertise. For the Mozart program, the groundbreaking biographer and musicologist Maynard Soloman was hauled before the camera to tell us that the child Mozart made lots of money for his father with his infant-prodigy genius. There isn't much about Mozart that Soloman doesn't know and he might have been useful in exploding a myth or two about Wolfgang but, no, here he was, telling us something that's a platitude to anybody who's seen Amadeus.

That's another reason why the celebrity biographies are more entertaining: their talking heads are not academics uttering banalities but pals, lovers, agents, groupies, spouses, and ex-spouses brimming with gossip, inside information, malice, sycophancy, and (once in a while) spontaneous emotion. They often prompt us to spot something in the film footage that we might otherwise miss.

For instance, I had seen more than once the news clip of Marilyn Monroe giving a press conference on the day she filed for divorce from Joe DiMaggio. She stutters a few words but soon gets whisked away by some big-shouldered, thunder-browed lawyers. I had always assumed they were doing the distraught movie star a favor. Maybe they were, but just before that clip was shown on "Biography," a studio insider informed us that, whether or not the Monroe-DiMaggio alliance had any future, the heavy hitters at 20th Century-Fox decided that Joe's jealousy was threatening MM's performances in Fox films. The studio chiefs dispatched their hired legal guns to protect their property. With that information in my ears, I watched the press conference with new eyes. Now it seemed to me that Marilyn's garbled words were an attempt to make sense of a situation that was happening too fast for her to control, and the lawyers were stifling her with their "protection." No matter the importance you or I may attach to Monroe's life and career, that little moment, so very American, so very mid-twentieth-century in its opposition of private confusion to public euphemism, was something that belonged in a time capsule. There's at least one moment like this in every "Biography," and that's why I keep watching.