Remembrance of Things Just Past

The U.S. learned a lot during the 1960s. So, apparently, did television. NBC's documentary, From Here to the Seventies, last week looked back at ten years worth of space and sports, of fads and fashions, of transportation and transplantation, of involvement and integration, of race and riot, and of politics, pot, poverty, pollution and the Pill. This super documentary was intriguing both in what it said and how it was said. For a presumed organ of the Establishment, NBC came out surprisingly and strongly pro-pot and antiwar, while parenthetically acknowledging that the new generation might teach old politicians a thing or two.

Borrowing from the movies, the Seventies flicked still photos, Peter Max-like drawings, cartoons and flash-card words before the viewer's dazzled eyes. The music provided a highly subjective counterpoint: the Beatles' Happiness Is a Warm Gun accompanied battle scenes from Viet Nam; Peter, Paul and Mary's Blowin' in the Wind underscored film clips of student demonstrations. The overall theme was Pete Seeger's Turn, Turn, Turn. The program marked what might possibly be a new pattern for TV news documentaries: except for a final three-minute, 40-second sermon from David Brinkley (in which he credited the entire decade to TV), there were no formula interviews, no ponderous philosophizing. Instead, it was a documentary full of flash and color, exciting the senses by inundating them with sights and sounds.

The Seventies, unfortunately, owed something else to the movies; it was 2½ hours long. Even a bearded Paul Newman, doing the narration, couldn't still a restless TV soul after the first 90 minutes. Not that this sort of happening shouldn't be encouraged. It should —the nature of the '60s makes just such journalistic examinations not only intriguing but necessary.