SummaryGreg Kinnear has been cast as President John F. Kennedy, Barry Pepper will play Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Katie Holmes will play First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and Tom Wilkinson will play Ambassador Joe Kennedy, Sr. in this story of the famous Kennedy family.
SummaryGreg Kinnear has been cast as President John F. Kennedy, Barry Pepper will play Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Katie Holmes will play First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and Tom Wilkinson will play Ambassador Joe Kennedy, Sr. in this story of the famous Kennedy family.
The miniseries--starring Greg Kinnear as JFK, Barry Pepper as Bobby, Katie Holmes as Jacqueline and Tom Wilkinson as Joseph Sr.--is without a doubt one of the best, most riveting, historically accurate dramas about a time and place in American history that has ever been done for TV.
It's not likely the audience for The Kennedys will be spending much time pondering what it was about this potent, lavishly produced eight-hour miniseries airing on ReelzChannel beginning Sunday night that caused former JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen, self-described political activists like the filmmaker Robert Greenwald, and concerned others to go to so much trouble to get the project quashed.
Owing more to its overambitious breadth of material than any overt political agenda, The Kennedys necessarily compresses, stretches, distorts and otherwise crams itself into a soap opera that is occasionally elegant and even moving near the end.
I can see why multiple networks passed on The Kennedys: not just because it's a political hot potato, but because it's a cobbled-together, mean-spirited piece of work that can't help alienating viewers, whether you venerate the Kennedys or dislike them.
Instead, The Kennedys is blandly admiring when paying due respect, mildly cheesy when hauling out the trash, and understaged at every turn, the better for viewers to project their own fantasies onto it.
Kennedys is a hamfisted mess, both slothful in its pacing and leaden in whatever underlying message was meant to be given. It's not the Kennedy family or legacy that suffers here, but the people involved in the project.