The Kennedys   Starring: Greg Kinnear, Katie Holmes, Barry Pepper and Tom Wilkinson Universal Playback RRP: £24.99 8284498 Certificate: PG Available 08 August 2011

Key moments in the Kennedy history are charted including Election Day 1960, where America chooses between Senator John F Kennedy and his opponent Vice President Richard Nixon, the intense competition between the two Kennedy brothers, defining moments in the Kennedy administration, the special relationship between JFK and his First Lady, Jackie Kennedy and of his tragic and infamous assassination...

The Kennedys is an eight part series that stars Greg Kinnear (Little Miss Sunshine) as JFK, Katie Holmes (Batman Begins) as Jackie Kennedy, Barry Pepper (True Grit) as Robert F Kennedy and Tom Wilkinson (The Green Hornet) as Joseph F Kennedy. The series uses public events and background history to tell the intimate story of this iconic family’s epic achievements and private failures.

The series opens on election day 1960 - the day that JFK would become president and then skips backwards and forwards through the family history. JFK's father, Joe Snr., is the real driving force behind his children's success. We learn of Joe Jnr., the man who should really have been president, but he was killed in WWII, leaving Joe Snr. no option but to push JFK into Joe's place.

While an entertaining series, I had quite a few issues with it. There are some extremely important events that are glossed over. Now it could be that the American public are already au fait with the majority of there events, so it's not necessary to revisit them in detail, but to almost totally ignore them is a little odd. The most obvious example being the war in Vietnam. It's only mentioned in passing in one episode, which seems rather odd. Equally JFK's relationship with Marilyn Monroe is skipped over and is only really seen through the eyes of Bobby Kennedy. I suspect that a lot more was filmed, but eventually cut from the finished series. And is one of the conspiracy theories really that Monroe killed herself because the president no longer wanted to have an affair with her? Was she really so besotted with JFK that she could no longer function without him?

But on the flip side, other elements are wisely skipped over. For example, the actual assassination of JFK is almost totally told from the side of alleged shooter Lee Harvey Oswald and the producers wisely steer clear of attempting to stage the assassination when the Zapruder film is such a vivid image in peoples minds. Okay, close-up images of JFK and Jackie holding hands in the car is probably a little too much for most audiences to stomach, but if you ignore that element this works well. Whereas we do see Bobby's assassination, although we never discover that Sirhan Sirhan committed this act. In fact, anyone with no knowledge of the true history of the Kennedys would probably conclude from this series alone that the Mafia or the FBI were responsible for picking off the family one by one.

In a attempt to create added drama we see Joe Snr., (who has had a stroke) attempting to walk again for the first time when he hears the news of JFK's shooting. It's not an idea that works particularly well, but it does the job of showing how helpless a once powerful man has become.

The series also ignores the rest of the Kennedy clan, but then this is probably not surprising as there's just no way they could squeeze that much narrative into eight episodes.

Extras include From Story to Film: The Making of (45 min, 07 sec feature that touches on almost every aspect of the show's production); and Trailer (2 min, 26 sec).

Overall this is an entertaining series. The acting can't be faulted, even if some of the questionable directing choices can.

8

Darren Rea