Can you really take a century worth of history and condense it into a TV show -- even if that show is 12 hours long?
Of course not. Which is why ABC News' massive five-year project "The Century" didn't even try."We're very taken by the notion that we're not historians," said Peter Jennings, who anchors the six-part documentary series and co-wrote the best-selling book that accompanies it. "We are journalists. And so our history on both television and in the book is done from the ground up. This is not some 19th century hierarchical view of great men and great women. And because this has been the century of the common man to such an enormous degree, that's the way we've approached the whole project.
"I think people will find that that engages them in some way or the other."
There is more to "The Century" than simply the six-part ABC documentary. There's a 15 1/2-hour documentary ABC produced for cable's History Channel. There's a Web site www.thecentury.com. There's an educational outreach initiative that will reach approximately 250,000 teachers and 8 million students.
And there's that best-selling book "The Century," co-authored by Jennings and Todd Brewster, who also serves as a senior editorial producer on the TV series.
(How much work did Jennings himself actually do on the research and writing of the book? "Oh, an enormous amount, but he did much, much more of the writing than I did," the anchorman said. "Todd's name should have been first. Doubleday decided to put mine first.")
The centerpiece of "The Century," however, is the ABC series, which debuts Monday at 8 p.m. on Ch. 4. (See accompanying box)
"The History Channel series is decadal -- it's chronological," Jennings said. "And it's a good series. It's fun.
"For the ABC television network, which is our home and our provider, we wanted to do something more interesting."
So, instead of trying to cover 100 years of history, the ABC team decided to tell a handful of individual stories with greater meaning.
"What we found in doing the book is that when journalists try to approach history, they're very wise if they approach it in a story sense," Jennings said. "We write stories for a living, and we wanted to make very certain, both with the book and with the television series as well, that we didn't do a top-down history. No historian in their right mind would chew off 100 years and try, even before it was over, to try and do a definitive history.
"So, what we've tried to do with the book and now with this series, is to try to tell stories."
The six episodes each pair two different stories -- stories that may not seem immediately related but which do contain connections. (See accompanying box) And a lot of thought went into this "twinning."
"In the case of Lindbergh and the moon, we really look at two different sides of technology, two different Americas," Brewster said. "When Lindbergh goes up in 1927, he goes up alone. He's a man who's a throwback to the 19th century. He's a man of sort of traditional values at a time when the nation is caught in the grips of a battle between the forces of modernism and the forces of traditionalism.
"Forty-two years later, when the moon landing happens, it is the work of an enormous bureaucracy -- 400,000 people (and) taxpayer money."
Perhaps one of the odder "twinnings" involves Elvis Presley and Martin Luther King Jr.
"My personal favorite, and I don't mind admitting it, is we have paired two Memphis stories," said executive producer Tom Yellin. "One of them is about the emergence of Elvis Presley as a force in many different ways. And the other is about the sanitation strike in Memphis in 1968 that led to the death of Martin Luther King. And the connection between those two things is not just geographical. Elvis embodies the forces of sex, of technology. . . . But he also embodies the changes, the unleashing of the racial forces in this country, and the way that race is such an important part of American culture."
"And then, when you think about having lived through the sanitation strike in Memphis in 1968, that story has not been reported nearly as much as many other things that happened in Martin Luther King's life. But it captures much of the black experience through the century. And we think those two go together in a very, very interesting way."
The show includes Hitler, of course -- concentrating on his rise to power, and World War I, as part of the emergence of American power that the story relates to the American experience in Vietnam.
"Deliberately doing the rise of Hitler rather than the actual war itself is not merely to be arbitrary, but to perhaps to see a cautionary tale," Jennings said. "To do the First (World) War and Vietnam together is to see, hopefully, the consequences of a long-term American notion about what represents democracy."
One of the biggest challenges was narrowing the field of stories down from hundreds to a dozen.
"It really was a lot of fun," Yellin said. "It's hard, but really interesting, to try to make a decision about -- do you do the Scopes trial? We spent a lot of time talking about that. If you're going to do World War I how do you do it? What do you say that's different? If you're going to do the moon, how do you take it on in a way that's interesting? Does it make sense to do the garbage strike in Memphis or should we do the march on Washington in 1963?"
And there were surprises along the way.
"Well, there are scores of stories that, even though we were all reasonably well-educated men, came as stunning revelations when you went and looked back at them," Jennings said. "And that would include some of the stories we reported ourselves when we went and looked back at them in different contexts."
In many ways, "The Century" is an anecdotal history. More than 500 eyewitnesses to history were interviewed -- 135 appear in the book and several dozen appear in the TV projects.
And "The Century" is bucking the trend of lists that seem to have become so popular. It's definitely not a list of the best or the worst of the most of anything.
"I know there are lists out there, and I don't mean to suggest they don't contribute, but we very consciously at the beginning decided we would not accomplish what we wanted to do by doing a series of lists," Jennings said.
And, even after five years of work, the anchorman can barely contain his enthusiasm for the project. And he's confident viewers will be excited about it, too.
"We have found a surprisingly high level of enthusiasm for the notion of a Century project," Jennings said. "Doubleday printed 230,000 books. I personally didn't think they'd sell 230,000 books and I thought we'd look like idiots. They may well sell a million.
"Or two million," Yellin interjected.
"That may be overstating it," Jennings said. "But we know that they have now printed close to two million books."