The Sixties

Hanks himself book-ends this serviceable, talking heads/illustrative clips treatise with a pair of all-encompassing quotes.

This is a comfort-food smorgasbord for the Woodstock generation, a harking back to that vision of ourselves as a nation with shared ideals and values.

Respectable, incomplete survey (on TV) Thursday night, but future installments look better.

At its best The Sixties is admirable, but to riff on an old promotional slogan, it isn’t all that it could be: Yes, it’s an exercise that might capture the magic of landing on the moon, but doesn’t take the extra step that would send viewers over it.

Pperhaps as a result of that mission, The Sixties often feels like an academic project, something for a modern history class.

The historical documentaries are more successful than the cultural ones, for having a better story to tell, but all are made in a similar style, without written narration, driven by news clips and interviews (with scholars, participants and celebrity rememberers, Hanks naturally included).