Television: A Quick 1,000

You wouldn't have thought it, but in his 1998 documentary Cold War, Sir Jeremy Isaacs had it easy. In that show, he could impress the viewer with bombshells (real ones); in Millennium (CNN, Sundays through Dec. 12, 10 p.m. E.T.), he has to astonish us with what we already know. This 10-hour, chronological series doesn't always succeed, but at its best, its hyper welter of history renders the familiar surprising.

Millennium hopscotches the world in vignettes, making regions characters in a global mini-series (and paying ample attention to non-Western areas). It eschews Ken Burnsian still lifes for a tarantella of computer animation, film clips, re-enactments and folk performances, whirling impatiently like the dervishes and dancers it uses to maximum effect. This mix can shock us into seeing the present in the past, as when Isaacs crosscuts modern Italian hipsters and preening Renaissance Florentines. The conventional re-enactments, however, are like a forced march to colonial Williamsburg.

Isaacs can't help his subject's unruliness, but one wishes for more interpretation and overarching narrative--a history of ideas atop the history of events. There are a couple of implicit morals. The first is that cultures that turned inward, notably China (the breakout star of the show, with an apparent big role in the sequel), have not fared so well as those that were outward looking, even imperialist. The second is that the era's driving force, for good and for ill, is human arrogance. This millennium is a graveyard of eternal empires, authoritative explanations and overreaching ambitions that--like Isaacs'--every so often manage to show us something new under the sun.

--By James Poniewozik