'Kennedys' Home Movies': We can't get enough

TLC has assembled a vast trove of Kennedy footage here, beginning with Joe Sr., then moving through his children, with (naturally) a major focus on JFK and Jacqueline. The stock footage tracks a historic timeline - inauguration, assassination, Robert's election as senator from New York, and so on - interspersed with some home movies of a large, sprawling and to all outward appearances very happy multigenerational family. It's narrated effectively by Stockard Channing.

MY SAYTV's great appetite for all things Kennedy will likely never be sated. The History Channel recently spiked a not entirely complimentary eight-hour miniseries, reportedly after Kennedy family members intervened, so you'll have to make do with this long and nostalgic portrait in the breach. We are so deeply familiar with this clan - or are under the illusion we are - that very little of this footage will seem surprising. Like all home movies (about half of the footage here qualifies), people seem frozen in time at the happiest moments of their lives, in sharp contrast to the public grief we also have shared. There is nothing negative or quarrelsome or unseemly (apart from an oblique reference to Marilyn Monroe). And yet it all feels so very sad.

BOTTOM LINE The most poignant home movies are of JFK and his family in late summer of 1963, in Hyannis.

GRADEB+