The Kennedys (2011)

The sheer power of these stories carries The Kennedys even during the occasional stumbles that result from trying to pack 40 years of history into five and a half hours of programming.

If you can accept you're watching the Kennedy saga through the prism of the "Fringe" universe, what you will find is an absorbing, addictive drama, with some authentic performances.

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.

The Kennedys has the look and feel of a 1980s miniseries, and it's not trying to be anything more exalted. Unlike "The Borgias" and "Camelot," its reach does not exceed its grasp.

In attempting to be both sprawling and intimate, The Kennedys winds up in a narrative no-man's land.

The Kennedys has nothing much new to tell, and tells it over and over again.

Watch The Kennedys--if you haven't already had enough--and you'll instead see a compelling, well-told tale of a political dynasty with beauty marks, warts, doubts and the embedded determination to plow full steam ahead.

It's well made and also at times unnecessarily cheesy.

Definitive history The Kennedys is not. But most of the flaws explored here mostly make the characters seem human. The series credits wins as well as losses and sends most of its characters home on a positive note.

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.