The Forsyte Saga - The Complete Series
The Forsyte Sagais often cited as the first television   miniseries; it wasn't, but there's no question that it was a singular, powerful  cultural phenomenon that deservedly got under the skin of European viewers in  1967 and changed the American TV landscape two years later. (Among other things,The Forsyte Sagabrought more viewers and extra clout to a then-struggling public television in the U.S., and gave rise to PBS'sMasterpiece  Theatre.)Today the 26-episode production, based on several novels and short stories by  John Galsworthy, is a more timeless enterprise than many of the protracted  British TV dramas that have followed. While it would be wrong to considerThe  Forsyte Sagahigh art, it's certainly a mesmerizing and inspired mix of  theater, sprawling Victorian narrative, thinking man's soap opera, and some  finely tuned, 1960s black-and-white production values that (especially when shot  outdoors) are strikingly handsome.Above all,Forsyteis driven by its characters--perhaps to an extreme,  though the two-generation storyline makes no apologies for creating compelling  people whose capacity for short-sighted blundering, bursts of grace, and  slow-brewing redemption make them recognizably human. Eric Porter towers over  everything as Soames Forsyte, a humorless attorney whose guiding principles of  measurable value cause great heartache but slowly evolve, leaving him a graying,  good father, arts patron, and sympathetic repository of memory. From the cast of  150 or so, other standouts include Susan Hampshire as Soames's troubled  daughter, Nyree Dawn Porter as the wife of two very different Forsyte men, and  Kenneth More as the  family's artistic black sheep.--Tom Keogh