Waving the flag: PBS's `Freedom' & A&E's `Benedict Arnold'. (Media).

It's the best of times and the worst of times for Freedom: A History of US, the gravitas-laden PBS series that commenced in mid-January. On the one hand, this earnest eight-hour documentary--which is based on Joy Hakim's books for young people, but which is being marketed as adult fare--dovetails brilliantly with the historical moment. Each solemn line of voiceover, each generality about the concept of liberty, each dramatic image rescued from the archives, seems to resonate with the nation's post-9/11 anxieties and with current premonitions about impending war.

Listening, for example, to a description of how external threats helped unite early Americans, who "often didn't seem to have much in common," it's impossible not to think of the U.S. flags that have proliferated over cars and in front of residences in the last sixteen months. "Freedom is a word Americans refer to a lot these days," series host Katie Couric intones early in the first episode, and that truism seems to lend the series a raison d'etre as palpable as the front page of the New York Times.

At the same time, watching these programs--or logging on to the Web site that PBS has packed with nifty interactive features like the "Scavenger Hunt through History" ("Did they have steamboats during the Civil War?")--one is left with the disturbing impression that the entire initiative has been cooked up by the Defense Department. Through images and sounds, Freedom panders to nationalist sentiments: segments of narration, illustrated with close-ups of historical documents or battle scene paintings, tend to pause for vistas of Hallmark Card triteness--picturesque rolling rural hills, waves breaking on a beach, a sunrise over the ocean--or shots of the American flag wafting in the breeze, while schmaltzy versions of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," for example, play on the soundtrack.

More subtly manipulative are the voiceovers by A-list celebrity actors (including Jennifer Aniston, Sean Connery, Whoopi Goldberg, and Reese Witherspoon) reading quotations by historical figures. It is not that the speech patterns of Michael Douglas as Benjamin Franklin or Anthony Hopkins as George Washington convey any particular message. The familiar yet glamorous intonations--with the inevitable associations of cinematic heroism and villainy, suspense, pathos, and catharsis--put one in the mood to be emotional, to identify with the documentary's subject matter on the level of sentiment, rather than intellect.

It does not help, of course, that George W. and Laura Bush supply a cozy introduction to Freedom's first episode, a detail that, to anyone with mild conspiracy-theorist tendencies, might suggest a deliberate synergy between the White House and public television. (After all, with funding scarcer than ever these days, nonprofits need support as badly as any re-election-bound politician.) Were some governmental entity to be put in charge of bolstering patriotism amid the PBS-watching public, seeding civic spirit in the nation's kids, and generally inflaming the kind of us-versus-them mentality that might endorse the invasion of Iraq, launching this series would not be a bad way to go.

That's not to say that Freedom, which will run in weekly installments (check local listings), consists of unadulterated boosterism. The series's high-speed chronicling pauses to dwell on times when freedom for some Americans relied on or accompanied the oppression of others. For example, in episode eight ("Whose Land Is This?"), covering the years between 1865 and 1875, Columbia University historian and Freedom commentator Eric Foner remarks, apropos of the dispossession of Native Americans, "Owning land has been essential to white people's definition of freedom. So the freedom of many white Americans depended on the dispossession of this other people."

To mention one of the period photographs that serve to illustrate Foner's point--a mountain range of buffalo bones, as tall as a man, running parallel to a railroad track--is to hint at the fascinating images Freedom's creators have assembled for their account of American history. Some of these documents and photographs have presumably shown up in the traveling exhibits mounted in conjunction with the series and supported by its primary funder, General Electric. The exhibits are touring the country, from Schenectady to Kansas City to Los Angeles, while a grander collection (which includes original printings of the Constitution and the Emancipation Proclamation) is divided between New York and Washington, D.C.

It's intimidating to consider the production and marketing muscle that has gone into these tours, not to mention the Freedom Web site (www.pbs.org/historyofus) and the companion sixty-seven-song CD set (available from Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings).

Slightly less elaborate resources were mustered for another TV tribute to American history that also made its debut in January--though A&E's Benedict Arnold: A Question of Honor was, at least, advertised on the sides of New York City buses. Scheduled for release on video and DVD on February 11, Benedict Arnold stars Kelsey Grammer as George Washington and Aidan Quinn as the eponymous Revolutionary War general whose hot-headed sensitivity to insults leads him to betray his country.

The fact that, just last fall, a new play, Richard Nelson's The General from America, dramatized Arnold's story at Houston's Alley Theatre and New York's Theatre for a New Audience, suggests that the tale's themes of treachery, patriotism, and international conflict are in sync with the current zeitgeist. With its scenes detailing mutinies and anti-Loyalist reprisals, not to mention its unnecessarily ghoulish shots of eighteenth-century horrors like anaesthetic-free amputations, A&E's offering did underscore the inglorious aspects of America's birth.

Those grim sequences only served to emphasize the moments that grasped for uplift, like Washington's paean to the resilience of his soldiers at Valley Forge. The troops' endurance demonstrated, the Founding Father says to Arnold, that "the hand of God is upon us. I believe that our cause is blest and that manna will fall from heaven ... some victory or catastrophe that will turn these thirteen states into a country." In a historical moment that seems pregnant with some victory or catastrophe, it is nearly impossible to hear this speech without being moved. Still, the A&E scriptwriters (who, after all, also came up with those limb-hacking shots) deserve only limited credit. These days, when entertainment is stirring, it is sometimes all in the timing.