Historical

By Richard Zoglin

SHOW: THE PRIZE

TIME: JAN. 11-14, 9 p.m. on most stations, PBS

THE BOTTOM LINE: This eight-hour chronicle of the history of oil is TV's equivalent of a great read.

The first thing a layman may be surprised to learn from The Prize, a new PBS series about the history of oil, is that the stuff wasn't always around. "Rock oil" was known in the early 19th century only as a medicine. It wasn't until 1859 that some Pennsylvania businessmen first extracted it from the ground and refined it into kerosene. For years, the substance was used mainly to light lamps. Only with the coming of the automobile did oil become the most sought-after fuel in the world. Since then it has been the impetus for great capitalist enterprises, the object of geopolitical maneuvering, the reason for wars.

And now oil is the subject of a four-night, eight-hour documentary series on PBS. Based on Daniel Yergin's Pulitzer-prizewinning book (with Yergin himself serving as principal commentator), the series uses all the familiar tricks of the TV historian's trade -- old photos and film clips, offscreen narration combined with onscreen talking heads -- to make the subject come alive. Which it does marvelously: The Prize is TV's equivalent of a great read.

The first episode revolves around two antagonists: John D. Rockefeller, who built Standard Oil into one of the most powerful monopolies in the world, and Ida Tarbell, the muckraking journalist who exposed the unscrupulous tactics by which he did so. Later the series highlights less celebrated but equally colorful characters: people like Columbus ("Dad") Joiner, the Texas wildcatter who sought money by scouring newspaper obituaries and writing mash notes to wealthy widows, and Calouste Gulbenkian, the powerful Middle Eastern oil broker who was reportedly so suspicious that he had two sets of doctors, one to check up on the other.

The Prize lucidly chronicles the recurring cycle of glut and shortage that has marked oil's history. It brings a fresh perspective to even the most familiar events. "Oil is the untold story of World War II," begins one episode -- which then tells that story in rich detail: how higher-octane fuel helped British planes outmaneuver their German foes during the Battle of Britain; how gasoline shortages slowed down Rommel and frustrated Patton; how the fuel situation in Germany near the war's end was so dire that a newly developed jet had to be toted onto the runway by cows.

Series producer William Cran has assembled a mass of material with scholarly care and storytelling verve. Each episode is dramatically built, often starting with one key event, then working backward and forward from it. The historical medicine is enlivened with spoonfuls of pop-culture sugar. (In one old TV ad, Marilyn Monroe urges a gas-station attendant to "put Royal Triton in Cynthia's little tummy." Cynthia is her new car.) Not least important is Paul Foss's urgent theme music, one of the best TV scores since The Civil War.

Only in the end, a mushy account of the environmental movement's challenge to oil's dominance, does the series falter. Most of the time, The Prize is a gusher of brisk and illuminating history.