Review from People Magazine

Vol. 51 No. 5
By Terry Kelleher, Feb. 8, 1999

Think the makers of this miniseries might have taken on a tad too much? Two months ago, ABC News devoted a two-hour documentary to the events of 1968 alone. The '60s (note that title: simple yet grandiose) tries to cram the whole tumultuous decade into a four-hour package of fictional drama, archival footage and music, music, music. There are so many rock, folk and R&B oldies competing with the dialogue that you expect an announcer to break in with a sales pitch for the soundtrack CD (in stores now–from Mercury Records!).

The '60s is filled with melodrama, but then so were the '60s. Brian Herlihy (Jerry O'Connell, Scream 2), a Chicago-area high school jock, enlists in the Marines and winds up fighting in Vietnam. His brother Michael (Josh Hamilton) attends a local college, joins the antiwar movement and falls for a beautiful activist (Jordana Brewster; see page 156). Teen sister Katie Herlihy (Julia Stiles) gets pregnant, runs off to lose herself in the San Francisco counterculture and bears a child she names Michael Rainbow. (If you don't think the siblings eventually reunite at Woodstock, you're not picking up the right vibe, man.) Meanwhile, Emmet (Leonard Roberts), a young black man tangentially connected to the Herlihys, goes from Southern civil rights marcher to Watts rioter to Haight-Ashbury hippie to Black Panther. What a trip.

The script couldn't be more schematic, but the cast (especially Jeremy Sisto as a radical firebrand) captures the passions of the time. If you're at all nostalgic for the decade, you won't be able to resist those siren songs of The '60s. Bottom Line: Not a totally golden oldie, but it hooks you.

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