Television: Romans and Countrymen

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The eight-week series, which started Oct. 27, focuses on three fictional New York City families, following their his tories from 1880 to 1900. There are the poor Irish immigrants, the middle-class clergyman's family and the railroad-and bank-owning aristocrats. Real events, such as the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, provide the framework for each episode. The scriptwriters, unhappily, are responsible for the rest.

The research was painstaking, and everything, from silverware to the mating habits of the gentility, is as accurate as 1,000 hours in the library could make it. Why, then, is it that I, Claudius, which is unrestrained hokum, seems truthful, while Families, which is so much more truthful, seems like hokum? The reason is that CTW has brought everything to the series but imagination and talent. The act ing is spotty, the direction glacially slow. The characters have as much life as the figures in the dioramas at a museum of natural history, and The Best of Families is as interminable as a ninth-grade history class on the last Friday before vacation.